


A Toy Story

by roseveare



Series: Pinocchio is Bleeding [2]
Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-07-26 03:35:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7558555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseveare/pseuds/roseveare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of <i>Pinocchio is Bleeding</i>, Duke and Nathan may have found each other, but they still have a lot else to learn to live (or otherwise) with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Essentially the second half of _Pinocchio is Bleeding_ , though it has a different case and plotline. 
> 
> So this is not edited as much as it could be, yet for personal reasons am posting anyway, so please forgive any lingering typos and messiness.
> 
>   
> _To J & D:_  
> I'm dedicating my tv character porn to you,  
> but I guess at least the bigger themes are vaguely relevant?  
> & you know my sense of humour anyway.

The mornings were when it felt the most unreal.

The fact they weren't real competed with the presence of Nathan in Duke's bed as each day dawned and the facts of his strange, strange life registered anew.

Almost a month had passed since they had both died and been 'reborn', after a fashion, courtesy of Audrey's desperation plus a man's Trouble and ingenious-but-awful hobby. Now -- well, if you cut them, they did _not_ bleed. The neat row of stitches that still marred Nathan's arm just below his elbow would never heal. The skin that held his form together was no longer living, but animated by 'magic', which was how Nathan persisted in referring to Landon Tyler's Trouble even now. For that, Duke could apparently blame Jess Minion.

The ache and stiffness of their new condition had disappeared gradually over the course of the early days. One he was used to moving again in his own skin... hah... Duke’s hyperawareness of the differences had disappeared, and he tried like hell not to think about them. When his thoughts did meander in that direction, he felt himself get short of breath and start spiralling toward a waiting madness. He was in this body and couldn't get out of it short of oblivion. That was... a thing he needed to avoid.

They had become something other than human in ways Duke couldn't deal with if he was dumb enough to truly try and contemplate, but amid it all, there was still one thing keeping him together.

He woke up with the wonder that was Nathan's naked body stretched out beside him in bed, kissed by the dawn, all pale gold sunlight on pale skin. The marvel of his presence there at all was equalled by the fact that you _could not tell_. Nathan's skin still went pink and pressed with textures from the blanket in the places where he'd lain on it. A pulse beat slowly at the long curve of his exposed throat. The blue lines of veins threaded their web beneath his skin, and when Duke reached out and touched him, the skin was warm, and real, and alive.

Or seemed so, anyway.

Nathan didn't react to the caress, obviously. The changes wrought in them hadn't brought back his sense of touch. But there were ways around that, and he and Duke had been diligently working upon finding them in the weeks since their demise.

The real miracle was that Nathan was stretched next to Duke, willing and ready.

Duke slid his hand down to Nathan's hip, rolling his own body closer until he pressed up against Nathan's back and rested his forehead to the centre of the slim, muscular shoulder, feeling illusory warmth and a strong, regular beat.

Magic...

Don't. _Even_.

Nathan didn't feel the cold and had no reflex to grope after the covers if they got shoved away in his sleep, so he often greeted the dawn like today, exposed down to his trim thighs for the morning sun. In the winter, when it was colder, Duke would have to do something about that.

Meanwhile, the thought of waking up next to this again was pretty much what kept Duke ticking through each day.

Nathan made a soft noise and shifted, and it must have been Duke's own sounds that had given him away, much as Duke might wish it could be his touch that roused Nathan, and _aroused_ Nathan. His bed partner was doubly unreal, but somehow holding together better than Duke could.

Stubbornness alone, had been Duke's eventual conclusion. Stubbornness and a verbal exchange with Landon Taylor months before, that Nathan couldn't allow himself to back down from or prove false.

"Morning," Nathan murmured sleepily into the pillows. He rolled over into Duke's grasp. Duke's hand slid from a sharp hip, pushed by the movement into more intimate territory. Nathan's eyes dipped down and he gave a soft snort. "You're keen this morning."

"Pot. Kettle," Duke said.

Nathan pressed himself into Duke's hand and reached between their bodies with his own hand, searching to reciprocate. Duke slid fingers down to guide him. His body had been stirring itself to arousal since he'd woken to the sight of Nate bare from shoulders to ass in the early morning sunlight. Their hands entangled. No awareness of the touch intruded the gaze locked upon his.

Still, Nathan's cock reacted against his hand, and Nathan's eyes hungered for even touch that could not be felt. As though not looking down had become a challenge, Nathan read arousal and took all the cues of sex from Duke's eyes. Pinned by those staggeringly blue irises, Duke felt like he was having one of the most intensely sensual experiences of his life. 

It was hard to believe Nathan's hand on his dick was effectively reaching into a void, but Nathan had perfected all kinds of tricks of muscle memory and methods of utilizing what sense of the world around him he had. In the past few weeks, Duke had watched him grow into greater confidence using those tricks in an intimate context. The occasional _ouch_ still couldn't be helped when you had a bed partner who couldn't feel what he was doing, but they were both working on not letting it set them back.

Duke came with a groan and shudder, thrusting against Nathan's hand and hip. He sagged into Nathan's chest, the heat and hardness in his own hand unchanged while Nathan's rough kisses attacked his ear and jaw and an arm wrapped securely around him. After an interval, Duke decided it wasn't too early for sexual acrobatics and stirred himself, wriggling out from Nathan's arm. Nathan watched through half-closed eyes as he crawled back across the bed with the lube. He rolled over to rest his head on one elbow, but Duke dived in to tussle with him and pin him flat. "Oh, no. Just think, if we don't deal with that, you'll have to go to work with it."

"I usually find a shower works just fine."

Note no need to specify 'cold shower' because Nathan's showers were freezing by default. Duke made a noise of outrage at the proposed waste of a good erection. He moved over Nathan, thrusting his daubed fingers a final few times into himself and watching Nathan’s hungry eyes track the movements. Nathan put a hand possessively on his neck. Duke groaned as he withdrew his fingers and lowered his body onto Nathan's erection. Nathan curled his hands around Duke's ribs, hips yearning upwards.

Duke bit his lip against the initial pain of the tight fullness and worked himself down onto Nathan again, feeling the give as his body eased and pleasure took over from discomfort. He groaned gently as he rocked, and Nathan's fingers danced against his ribs and hip. He ground down and pushed back up, feeling the friction start to work as Nathan brushed the spot inside him, then started to ride Nathan harder.

The bed groaned in protest but the fantastic part about being on a boat was that no-one would hear them. Nathan might keep his silence anyway, self-contained and buttoned down out of habit, but Duke was free to be as loud as he wanted.

***

Afterward, they still went in the shower. While the thought of Nathan showing up to work among a bunch of cops while still smelling of sex and Duke amused the hell out of Duke, it didn't much amuse Nathan.

They'd given up sex in the shower fairly early on, after discovering it could be surprisingly hazardous between two six-foot-plus grown men. Duke had fixed the faucet and the door, and they'd watched those early superficial scrapes and abrasions with nervous eyes until they healed. As long as the skin wasn't punctured through, the magic worked and the small stuff fixed itself. So far, the only mark of permanence was the slice Nathan had drawn across his own arm to establish what they'd become. All the same, in the shower they just washed each other, interspersed with the occasional grope or kiss.

Nathan Wuornos cheerful was a funny thing, but another bonus of sex with the guy was that it tended to do that, a mood lift that made the sex worthwhile even if Nathan couldn't experience pleasure through sensation.

It was kind of a gift to Duke as well, because it wasn't as though Nathan's personality itself had changed overnight, and he was still kind of a stiff. He had to make the most of moments like these, where Nathan was silly and amenable from sex.

But Nathan eventually pulled away from their kisses -- which were getting a bit too enthusiastic and far south for shower-time -- and said, "I need to get to work."

"Fine," Duke huffed. "Because hounding the dangerous criminal population of Haven is _so_ much more important than this."

"Well, it is," Nathan said. "Although most of that's right here in this room." He delivered Haven's dangerous criminal population a deliberately loud smack of a kiss in the centre of the forehead and pulled back, one hand dragging at the faucet while the other shoved at the shower door. "Besides, there might be a Trouble."

Duke winced, because _Trouble_ made him think _Audrey_ , and he hadn't managed to see her yesterday, but Officer Parker wasn't in a very bright place at the moment. After the shipwreck's resurfacing they'd put together the bits of what she knew and what they knew (Nathan could feel her _touch_ and, well, she hadn't been killed alongside them by the death Trouble). Her situation of existential freakout about her place in the universe, added to the fact they'd known and suspected something but been too involved in their own shit to find the right moment to tell her, meant she wasn't too happy with them. She was mostly eating a lot of bakery confectionary and spending most of her free time with Julia Carr.

"How... is she?" Duke asked, lamely.

"Better," Nathan said, with a trace of reluctance. "Coming out of it a bit, I think."

Duke imagined that it would be similar to the sort of gloom that descended upon discovering you were _no longer real_ because you'd died and your friends had you stuffed and reanimated and then tried to cover up the fact. Not that he was still bitter.

"She'll be alright," Nathan concluded, with more Wuornos stubborn wishful thinking than reasoned conviction. "She's just had a few shocks lately." He pulled his shirt on without bothering to properly dry.

Duke gave him a pitying look. He was so determined to stoic this out. "Yeah. Sure. Things are so rough for Audrey."

Nathan traded the look back for a quelling one and said, somewhat predictably, nothing. He pulled on his jeans without underwear, which would give Duke something nice to think about for the rest of the day, added his gunbelt and adjusted his badge, then left, tipping his head and sliding his eyes at Duke in an extension of his silent sarcasm.

"Yeah. You have a good day!" Duke yelled, padding out of the shower and leaning out the bathroom door to yell after Nathan's skinny back as it disappeared down the corridor.

He got a backward wave flipped over a shoulder. No look back, no parting kiss. Typical.

But this was Nathan, and Nathan was what he was sleeping with. He felt a bit foolish for his more romantic fantasies of the early morning.

Duke tried to go back in the shower, but the water quickly ran cold. Cursing and shivering, he got dressed and tried to wrap his head around actual plans for the day. Nathan being there on his boat and naked tended to mess with brain function when it came to thinking about things other than Nathan there on his boat, naked. But having a restaurant meant planning menus a week or more in advance, and food orders, and showing up for at least a couple of shifts a week because it helped staff morale to prove he wasn't above getting his hands dirty. Besides, being behind that bar was a whole lot more fun than he'd ever expected respectable work ought to be.

He had other work, too, but that had been put on a back-burner of late. Spending a lot of time trying to get into a cop's pants was a scupper on illegal activities, for sure... and Nate was definitely enough of an asshole to arrest him despite the fact they were sleeping together, if he ever got a whiff that illegal activity was still going on under his nose.

The illicit jail visits would no doubt have been fun, Nathan having the run of the station and keys to the cells and everything. But all things considered, Duke was probably going to err on the side of not doing anything to risk the health of this relationship, right now.

Nathan held a direct line to his sanity. That was far too much to risk.

***

It was a quiet morning in the _Gull_ , at least up until the point the bear walked in. Enough time had passed, now, that people had stopped dropping by just to give him funny looks -- Vince and Dave being by far the worst culprits for that, and really it was bad enough that they were _stuffed_ , had Audrey _had_ to let half the crazy old coots in town know about it? On the other hand, it had brought out of the woodwork the people who were in the know, which was definitely interesting, and might be of use someday.

Without the macabre busybodies, there were a few locals swinging by and the odd tourist, at this time of the morning, though mostly this hour was about preparation for later when the place filled up and the bulk of the food orders would come in. Even Haven didn't have too many drinkers who made a nine o'clock start.

So Duke just puttered around, taking care of things, keeping himself busy and distracted because _not_ being those things lately was an invitation to seriously screwing himself up with Thinking. Until the bear walked in.

Yeah.

He heard the door slam, and looked up and saw nobody. He looked all around, still saw nothing, then looked down at the counter just in time to jolt sharply away as the bear -- which had been below his eye level -- hefted itself onto a stool with just two feet of polished wood between them. It made a sort of growl/groan as it seated itself, which admittedly sounded more like a human noise than an animal one.

Duke fumbled the glass in his hand and managed to get it onto the counter without dropping it, then stepped back again sharply, staring.

It wasn't a _real_ bear, although the fact it had just walked in of its own accord raised a good deal of questions about his assumptions of reality in general, so okay then, not a _bear_ , more like a _teddy bear._ One of those big, ugly ones made from cheap synthetic fur, with bad seams and squishy stuffing. The sort kids won at fairgrounds. Three feet, three and a half feet tall, height difficult to call while it was sitting down. It had a paunch and a sour expression.

It eyed Duke right back and said, in an unmistakably aggressive tone, " _Problem?"_

Duke blinked, shook his head briskly and reminded himself that this was Haven. While he probably hadn't seen weirder things, he'd seen plenty of things weird enough to reassure him that this one wasn't drifting too radically off-base. "Can I... get you something?" he asked the teddy bear. He eyed its fluffy sides and, obviously, it wasn't wearing clothes, but he decided not to raise the question of whether or not it had any money.

"Give me a double shot of Jack... no, wait. Just give me the damn bottle."

Duke shrugged and asked the universe in general, "Why not?", lifting his eyes and holding up his arms before he turned to get the whiskey, and a glass, and set them both down in front of the oversized, annoyed, talking teddy bear. "Enjoy," he said, giving the bear a nod and the sort of smile that probably said 'what-the-fuck-ever' because some reactions you just couldn't rein in.

It stared at him. "A walking, talking child's toy comes into your bar and you serve it alcohol?" The question, Duke observed, wasn't stopping it from pouring itself a generous glass and, in the next moment, tipping it down its furry neck. He watched with odd fascination as it opened a mouth he'd have sworn was stitched on and bared real-looking teeth and pinkish-red flesh and tongue as it threw the drink back.

"I live _here_ ," Duke pointed out. Crazy danced giddily at the edge of his thoughts. "Say, did you hear this one: a bear walks into a bar..."

It tipped its head on its side and narrowed plastic dots of eyes that really _shouldn't_ ought to narrow. "Do you really want to go there?"

Duke shook his head and retreated. The bear seemed to want some alone-time, and he... wanted to call Nathan. _Now_. He eyed the couple at the back of the room who were sneaking out and trying not to let the freakish talking toy see them, couldn't remember if they'd paid -- thought processes were struggling a bit -- but just gestured 'whatever' with his empty hands and jerked his head at the door to send them on. At least the place was quiet.

He took his phone into the store room and tried to call Nathan, but he wasn't picking up. After a bunch of tries, he gave in and called Audrey instead.

"Nathan's working," she said, when that was his first question, though _why_ it should be his first question considering what he had sitting out in his bar that would presumably be expecting him to re-emerge and make small-talk with it soon, he didn't know. "He probably turned his phone off, since you call him twenty times a day. What is it?"

"Trouble," Duke said. "I have a freakin' living, talking teddy in my bar knocking back booze. I _don't_ know if it's twenty-one, but I wasn't going to refuse to serve it."

"A _teddy bear_?" Her voice exuded disbelief and skirted outright laughter.

"Do not mock. You haven't seen the thing. It's spoiling for a fight."

"All right," she said, though he could hear the head-shake in her voice. "I'll get over there. Don't let it go anywhere."

Fine for her to say. Duke decided it would be redundant to try and make any reply to that, and that any time the bear cared to wander out of his bar again, he was letting it leave with pleasure. He put the phone away.

He pasted a smile on his face and went back out into the bar, where the bear regarded him suspiciously. It was already halfway down its bottle, and its eyes had a haziness to them, somehow. Duke wondered if he should close up in case any other customers tried to come in, but if doing that meant locking himself in with the thing, then hell with it, let them come.

"You go easy on that, now," Duke warned the bear in as friendly a manner as he could muster, as he tried to nonchalantly resume cleaning and stacking glasses.

"You think I can't handle my drink?" it slurred.

"I'd question if you're used to drinking," Duke tried. Oh, shit. "I mean--" He held up a hand. "'Scuse me, but you haven't walked in here before. So I'm wondering if this is... new." He made general indicative motions in the direction of the bear's ambulatory form.

"Well, excuse _me_ ," it huffed. "Talk about personal questions."

Duke winced. "Sorry. You know how it is. Bartender. Just trying to make conversation."

The bear slumped morosely. "You should try living day in, day out at the mercy and whim of a couple of bratty kids. You'd drink too, the first chance you got."

"I... don't doubt it."

"I don't mean to get down on the job, but... man, the job gets you _down_. So one day I'm thinking, shit, I swear this never used to be so hard. It's like a few days ago, I started having a real existential crisis. I didn't used to care at all, I didn't even have to _think_ about these kinds of questions. Today I got up from that messy bedroom floor and walked out. I left that kid behind and brought myself here. Five years of service, man. That's my kid, and I'm better than this, but it's too much for a bear to take. They should hand out medals."

The bear drained its glass again. Duke opened his mouth but was left largely wordless as it stoppered the bottle with a few inches of whiskey left in it and put it under its arm while it proceeded to slide off the bar stool and morosely weave its way back to the door.

"Anyway, thanks for the liquid courage. But I guess I should be going back. A bear's got to do... what a bear's got to..."

The door swung shut behind it. Duke just stood and _stared_ out into his empty bar. He didn't know how long it would have taken to shake himself out of it if it hadn't been for the screech of brakes and the loud crash outside.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Duke said, and charged out to do damage control. A big black Subaru was askew in the parking lot, and...

The blood was a shock. He skidded to a halt and stared, barely taking in anything said by the guy who fell out of the driver's side of the car. Guy freaking out, so fucking what? Duke's feet moved like he was in a trance, which was one explanation, because he _really_ didn't want to go near that mess. But he remembered the pink, flesh-like insides of the teddy bear's mouth and thought, _shit_.

Apparently the rest of its insides had been just as... pink and fleshy.

Most of them were spread across the gravel of the parking lot, now. Still barely conscious of what he was doing, Duke sank down on his haunches and stared at the bear's unblinking, glassy eyes.

There was no trace of awareness there anymore.

Duke finally registered that freaking-out-guy was grabbing at his shoulder and saying something more specific than, _I killed a fucking walking toy,_ and looked up, blinking. "Huh?"

"It's my daughter's teddy bear!" the guy said, hyperventilating. "What the hell am I gonna do?"

"...Buy a new one?" Duke tore himself away from the nasty sight and made it back to his feet, though they felt a bit unsteady. "Wait, you just hit a _living_ teddy bear with your car and _that's_ what you fix on?"

"She's going to be devastated." The guy fisted his hands in his hair. His face was red. As Duke's expression no doubt became all the more _WTF?_ , the guy added, "Okay, she's Troubled. You... live here." He finished on that, lamely, perhaps realising that blurting such things out in public might not be the best move.

"Okay," Duke said, massaging his forehead with his hand. "Fine. Chill. My... partner is Troubled." _There you go, Nathan_. "I know about the frickin' Troubles." _And how_. "But this is a... a teddy bear. It's not alive. It's a toy. And these things are mass-produced. We can totally fake it, man. Just go clean the blood off your car, make an excuse to drive up to Bangor and the big toy stores, and find someplace that stocks this... particular bear. And I will deal with _this_." He gestured somewhat unwillingly at the corpse of the teddy bear.

Because wasn't that always his role? To get left to clean up the crazy shit.

He patted the guy solidly on the shoulder and sent him on his way, then shut the _Gull_ and put a _closed_ board out, and by the time he was calling Julia Carr, practically yelling, "Holy _fuck_ , Julia, please tell me you're still filling in as M.E.?", Audrey was pulling up her rental car in front of him.

***

"Holy _crap_ ," said Julia. Duke held his hand tightly over his mouth as she poked around in the teddy bear's insides. "Really, Duke? You had to kill _Ted_?"

"The _guy_ killed it," Duke said, affronted. "Not on purpose, either."

She openly sniffed. And used an instrument to peel back the... fur layer... of the bear on the slab a little further. What was inside looked very, very real. "This is fucked up," Duke said, and slapped his hand back over his mouth.

"Well, it's definitely dead," Julia offered her opinion. "And it was definitely _alive_. A living creature. Not... you know."

"A stuffed toy," Duke ventured irritably.

"The fur looks pretty fake from the outside, but see, here, the layers? It's got dermis, and--"

"Please don't actually make him puke," Audrey said, with more humour than was really appropriate while attending the dissection of a teddy. She'd seemed more interested in her phone than the horror show so far, which was -- all things considered -- weird, but maybe had something to do with why she wasn’t with Nathan. _Nathan’s working_ , she’d said on the phone earlier. Had the two of them had a falling out?

"What I'm saying is he's not like you, or like a reversal of you -- unreal body with real insides. Even the parts that don't _look_ alive, they're alive. Or they were." Julia patted the undamaged furry face and closed his button eyes. "Poor fellow."

"Who's the Troubled person?" Audrey dragged her eyes from her phone and consciously put it away. "You said it was a little girl?"

"Uh..." Duke was forced to admit that he hadn't asked for any names, or details at all. But he could go back to the _Gull_ and get the license plate of the car from his security tapes. "I mean, how dangerous could it be?" he wheedled at Audrey in his defense. She was wearing a face that was totally judging him. "So a kid brought her teddy to life!"

Audrey shrugged, sighed and said, "Just so long as nothing else decides to take a walk to the nearest bar. Or become road-kill in front of people who won't have the first clue how to process all of this." Her eyes bugged a bit as she gestured to the dead bear. "We'll trace the vehicle and I'll have a quiet word with the family, just to make sure things are as safe as possible."

"I hope he manages to replace his kid's bear," Julia said. "You know, I had a favourite teddy when I was a kid and I would've just been..." She shut up, her mouth twisting a little at Audrey's expression. "No favourite teddy in the orphanage, huh?"

"It's not something I could claim to miss." Audrey shrugged. "We had toys, but they were shared between a dozen of us. Never got a chance to really pick favourites."

"Say, do you think Landon Taylor could help this little guy?" Julia suggested, brightly.

" _Huh_." Duke huffed a very involuntary laugh. "Now that would be ironic. Stuff the stuffed bear."

"Probably not," Audrey said. "I think it needs the skin mostly intact to work. Besides, I _really_ don't think we need to complicate things by using Landon's Trouble to reanimate anything or anyone else. Do you?" She gave Duke a challenging look. "What? Because you took the whole thing _so well_? Anyway, this is a toy. It never should have been alive to start with, so stop... feeling sorry for it. Guys? Okay?" She flapped her hands and shook her head.

"You are a _harsh_ woman, Audrey Parker," Duke said. Which was only sort of a joke, because he was kind of with Julia about the bear. Even if it was kind of a pisshead teddy.

Audrey got out her phone again and Duke looked at it pointedly. She pulled a face and said, a bit reluctantly, "I haven't heard from Nathan yet. I left a message for him earlier, when you called. He should have been in touch by now. _Don't_ \--" she raised a finger "--start freaking out. I'm sure he's fine."

But Duke had gone from vague irritation to the urge to get his own phone out and start calling, especially as Audrey took her radio from her belt and spoke into it, "Hey Laverne, has Nathan checked in?"

Duke didn't quite catch the answer, but it was evident that Audrey didn't like it.

"Where was he last?" He watched Audrey pause and nod to herself. "Okay, where was he _going_?" Another pause. "No, I'll go myself." She put the radio away. "All right, I give. Let’s do this. Sorry, Julia, but can you keep an eye on Ted here?"

Julia raised her eyebrows. "He's really not going anywhere."

"Later." Duke half-raised one hand in a wave as he followed Audrey out of the door. As they crossed to her car, he asked, "You and Nathan aren't working together any more?"

"Not every single case needs _two_ senior officers on it," Audrey responded. "Especially when you're just door-to-door canvassing with police sketches."

"Wow," said Duke. "I guess Garland really _isn't_ over the two of us."

Audrey gave him a sideways look but didn't deny that it was a punishment duty. Nathan hadn't said anything about being given grunt work. Duke was annoyed, both with Nathan for the omission and because the world was difficult enough without having to contend with people like Nathan's dad... although truly, he'd never been sure if it was genuine homophobia or _just him_. For that matter, he was annoyed at Audrey, too. They were fragile now, or at least, damage didn't work in quite the way they were used to and they didn't know all the rules yet. He'd at least felt better about Nathan continuing to go off each day to work _as a cop_ when he thought that Audrey had his back.

"There might be other motives for the Chief wanting Nathan on relatively light duties," Audrey reminded him, and okay, so it was possible Garland was also thinking along similar lines, but Duke had _seen_ the looks the old buzzard was giving him lately. It would take a lot to convince him that that was the whole of it.

***

Nathan had been showing bad-boy pinups door to door: one of the morning's bulletins from Bangor was known to have family in town. Audrey shoved a few pieces of paper at Duke as they got in the car and he looked at badly-printed faxed photographs and unhelpful information. What he could see of them looked like a _real_ friendly couple of guys.

"We'll have to follow his trail," Audrey said. "The station can't trace his phone. Apparently he really has switched it off." Or something else had happened to it, but that hung silent. "We'll try the houses at the end of each street until we can narrow things down from where he's been and where he hasn't to where he _is_."

"Right," said Duke, mostly just drowning in his own head, in all the pleas there for Nathan to _be okay_. Not just for Nathan’s sake, and for the sake of regular sex with Nathan, either -- he honestly didn't think he could cope with being like this _alone_.

Audrey started the car and screeched out of the morgue building's parking lot, and when Duke's cell phone rang, he was so busy clutching onto the seat and the door and praying to the gods of bad driving for mercy that he didn't register what the shrill noise was for a whole five seconds.

"Duke!" Audrey snapped at him, and he scrabbled for his phone -- _Nathan! Please be Nathan! --_ with shaking, hurried hands.

An unknown number displayed on the screen. But as Duke raised it to his ear, it was Nathan's voice on the other end. It didn’t sound like the Nathan he knew, though. A slice of unease cut through the centre of his stomach. Nathan's voice was a flat, toneless rasp, slow and mechanical and very, very wrong.

"Forty... two... Rowan," Nathan said, flat and dead. "Forty... two... Rowan." Even when Duke shouted down the line to him, begging for response, he kept saying it just that, the tone barely changing to indicate he'd heard. Just that slow, dull voice repeating the same words over and over.

"42 Rowan Street," Duke said desperately to Audrey. "We need to get there _now_." He clamped the phone to his ear and kept listening to the repeating voice, trying to reply to it in words that might comfort, might reassure, _might_ get through. "We're coming. Hang in there, Nathan. Hold on. We're on our way. We're gonna be there soon."

It felt like an eternity, mouthing pointless stupidities and clinging on for dear life while Nathan talked soullessly in his ear. Audrey screeched to a halt, slewing up the drive and onto the lawn, and they fell out of the car and charged up to the front door. It was unlocked. Inside, things seemed ominously quiet until Duke realised he still had the phone pressed to his ear in panicked reflex, and when he took it away he could hear the echo of Nathan's voice in the background, a split second out of sync from the tinny sound on the phone line.

"Nathan!" he yelled, throwing the phone aside and charging in. "Nathan!"

Audrey had her gun out and made some yelp of protest he barely registered. Duke was already down the empty hallway -- blood stain on the wall, shaped like a couple of fingers and part of someone's palm -- _not Nathan_ , because that was impossible when they didn't either of them bleed anymore -- and then through a doorway at the end...

Nathan was on the floor, his lips moving like an automaton. He had the receiver of a home phone pressed to his face, and it had obviously taken everything he had left in him to crawl to it.

His skin was colourless and dead, his eyes glassy and unreal. The _only_ part of him showing any movement at all was his mechanically repeating jaw, shaping the same words Duke had been listening to for the endless last five minutes. Over and over again. Like a broken toy.

There was a large, open stab wound in his midriff and his crawl for the phone had left a trail of rag scraps and sawdust across the floor.

"Oh my God." Duke was _freaking out_. Nathan looked... not exactly _dead_ , because he was moving, but he didn't look _real_. His skin looked old and stretched, not-living. He looked _stuffed_ , like the magic that was animating him, that made Landon's hobby creations into something more, was holding on by its very last thread. Nathan had said that the magic was in the stuffing, and there was an awful lot of his strewn across the floor. One of his arms had curled loosely near his belly, like he'd tried to keep it in, but had lost the focus to keep pressure on it.

At their entry, his eyes slid up and fingers loosed their grip from the phone receiver. It slipped down from his hand and his eyes clicked shut with a _horrible_ sense of finality.

"Nathan!" Audrey echoed his cry in the same moment, but Duke got to Nathan's side first, while she faltered and spun, her gun levelled behind them, obviously still concerned for securing the rest of the house. Duke grabbed a handful of the escaped stuffing, with no real idea what he was doing, and what he was doing was _definitely_ something that would have creeped him out if he'd had a moment to think about it. He slid his arm under Nathan's drooping head as he pushed at the rags, feeling sawdust slipping away through his fingers like some dry form of blood, pressing a handful of the escaped material back into the wound.

Nathan gasped and his neck went rigid again, his head tipped back, and the illusion of breathing and life returned to him all at once. He opened his eyes. Duke clamped his hand over the wound and with his other hand, pulled Nathan in against his shoulder. "Don't you go anywhere," he seethed, though it probably didn't make for the most comforting tone for Nathan to wake up to. "Nathan, look at me. Are you still in there?"

"Duke," Nathan said, and shifted. Duke wrestled with him a moment to keep him still. But his eyes looked down and as he registered his situation, widened. "I... must have passed out."

"Is he...?" Audrey had returned from her check of the house. Duke wondered if _he_ looked as pale as that. He felt unwell. Given the proof of exactly what they were now that he'd just witnessed in Nathan's body, it seemed weirder that he _could_ feel unwell.

"He's gonna be fine," Duke groaned, gripping Nathan. "Call Julia. Call _Landon_. Call..."

"Garland should know." Audrey's input was hoarse, but it sparked a murmur of protest from Nathan, and that reaction was all for the good. He was still in there. A moment later, Duke heard Audrey start talking, to Landon first by the sound of it. Duke pressed kisses to Nathan's forehead and watched him raise his eyes to them in that amused, bemused way that always said, _I don't know why you do that when you know I can't feel it_ , blinking slowly.

"Woman answered the door," Nathan said. "Had the picture in my hand. She lured me in. Guy from the mugshot was standing in the living room."

Audrey lowered the phone. "Landon's coming. He says try to scrape up the stuffing. We can get as much together as we can, he'll do the rest. He's just getting some tools to bring."

"It doesn't hurt," Nathan said, in a fairly reproachful attempt at saying something comforting, and really, what the _fuck_ , Nate? Duke stared at him and couldn't bring up words.

Audrey raised the phone back to her ear. "I'll call Garland. We need a police presence to secure the scene." There were bits and pieces of Nathan's very unconventional innards all over the room. "He can make sure he brings officers who are... in the know."

Nathan looked embarrassed by the attention, and yeah, totally dismayed at the prospect of Papa Wuornos showing up. But he didn't protest, presumably because this _was_ attempted murder of a police officer -- however weird the officer -- not to mention the matter of a crime scene and a dangerous armed dick on the loose.

Audrey got on her hands and knees and started scraping up the detritus, her breaths sharp and her face pale. "There's no point calling Julia yet. She can't do anything for him and she needs to guard the bear. It's Landon we need."

"Can we put the rest of... him... back inside?" Duke asked, somewhat desperately. His heart was absolutely pounding. Mostly in relief now, but also because he'd _felt_ Nathan feel like a _thing_ , a dead, stuffed, broken, inanimate _thing_ with shifting and sagging stuffing, when he'd touched him before. Even now, with his hand pressed over Nathan's midriff, he could feel how unnaturally empty things felt there, how loose the skin felt. Duke fought off queasiness. He needed to keep that hand pressed down tight. The slice was bigger than his hand could contain, but so long as he held the middle of it, no more than the odd few sandy particles slipped loose.

"I don't know," Audrey said. "It's Landon's magic. If Nathan's stable now, maybe we'd better wait for Landon himself to do it, in case that makes it, um, work better." She shrugged off her jacket and gathered it into a loose bag to contain the rags and sawdust she'd scraped together. She crawled over to them both, holding it out. "Nathan..."

"Hey." He smiled at her spacily.

"Don't touch him," Duke warned. He was pretty sure Nathan didn't want to find out what this felt like, and unfortunately there was every reason this job had to be relegated to the squeamish guy.

Audrey winced. She closed her eyes in an instant of private pain then shook her head, shaking it off. She put the bundle down next to Nathan's hands and he drew his fingers curiously over the rag-and-sawdust contents. Morbid fucker. "Nathan, there's no-one in the house now. Where did they go and what exactly happened?"

"Saw Graham Faud drag his girlfriend out to the car. She was screaming. I'm not sure... if it was an abduction or if it was just about _this_." He turned his fingers rather delicately in toward his midriff. "Griff White was here, too, but it was all over by the time he came downstairs." His face twisted in discomfort. "I was... lucky. Sure they'd have finished me off if I'd bled blood. They didn't want anything to do with me after they saw this. The woman was freaking out, and Faud wasn't doing much better."

'Lucky' was some word. The wound was large. The knifeman had stabbed and slashed and twisted. But Duke got his point. If Nathan had been really alive, he'd be dead right now. Fantastic. As it was, that was going to be _some_ scar, and that was if they were, well, lucky.

 _Fixable_ , Duke told himself fiercely, refusing to let himself entertain the alternative. _This is fixable_.

Audrey choked a sob, and curled her fingers over Nathan's shoulder, touching him through his clothes alone. "You know," she said, trying to inject her voice with some of her typical weird humour, "This gives a whole new meaning to getting the stuffing beat out of you."

***

Duke had to wonder if it had been so bad a circus last time, at the Kale house, when the two of them had been dead on the floor. He had a pretty good idea it was the same people present: those two officers who were giving him the wary looks, before Garland sent them on their way.

Not that Garland was any better. The first words out of his mouth to Nathan had been, "Jesus, what did you go do to yourself now?"

Nathan's curt reply had been, "I didn't do it to _myself_." That had been that, apart from sour glares between the two of them, except when Garland shifted his glare to Duke for variation.

Yeah. Still not popular. Not news. He still wasn't totally sure if that was because he was fucking Nathan -- not to make it sound one-sided because there was a great deal of _reciprocal_ fucking -- or if it was all down to bad blood with his dad, who'd been dead since he was eight, or if it was the fault of his own slightly dodgy dealings.

"Don't fidget," tsked Landon, who had a needle and thick thread, like catgut or something, and was working between Duke's pressing fingers to sew Nathan back together down the middle. He was trying to make the stitches as neat as possible, and had directed the pressure of Duke's hands so as to minimise puckering and deformation of the skin, but Duke still watched in dismay as the obvious and _permanent_ stitched seam-scar took shape.

"You try having a Police Chief stare at you like that," Duke returned.

"That's just what he does," Nathan muttered irritably. "Don't show fear." Which was a lot more dismissive than Duke was able to shrug it off with. But Nathan had grown up with this shit. And every time he started to think he'd had it tough with his asshole father, he had to remind himself that _his_ hadn't been able to, _with impunity_ , shut him in a police cell for the night as an idea of discipline.

Nathan's heels scraped on the floor as he drew his knees up, balance and movement seeming to be returning, better supporting his own posture, though he was still held securely between Duke and Landon as they worked. He slid a hand down next to Duke's, pushing the lip of the injury closed, replacing Duke's hold with his own. With no small relief, Duke withdrew his hands and refocused them on the task of supporting Nathan's head and shoulders.

"He was completely zoned out when we found him," Duke said to Landon. He described Nathan's earlier creepy state. "Do you know anything about that?"

But Landon just shook his head and looked creeped out himself, and Duke was reminded that the taxidermist had found out about this trouble himself rather... _late_ , to put it mildly. There was probably an awful lot he didn't know.

Landon put the last stitch through and stood up. "There. You should be good to go, Detective Wuornos. Nathan."

"Really?" Duke asked a bit dubiously, looking down at Nate then back up at Landon.

Landon nodded. "If he was living flesh and blood, I imagine it would be different. Although I should warn you, that's always going to be a weak spot. I'd get... I don't know, perhaps some kind of corset? Something to help contain the weight of the stuffing, apply pressure around his middle." He laced his own hands together and pressed them into his stomach in demonstration, breathing in. 

"Like, lace and ribbons?" Duke asked, raising his eyebrows.

Nathan made a choked noise.

"Whatever the two of you decide on, Mr Crocker," Landon said with amusement, waving one hand to say that the issue had nothing to do with him.

" _Duke_ ," Nathan said warningly, as Landon turned away and went to talk to the Chief and Audrey, out in the hallway. He was already twisting and scrambling up, keeping one palm pressed flat to the sewn scar. Extra support aside, right now he was going to need a new shirt to cover that.

"Okay, no ribbons, man," Duke said hurriedly.

They sort of held a look, for a moment, with their eyes level with one another again and Nathan standing free of support, strong and whole and _still there_ , damn it, then they surged together as though a room full of cops and Garland and Audrey didn't matter. You couldn't blame them, right? It had been _really close_ that time, Duke figured, eyes darting sideways to Garland, where he'd broken off from his conversation and was looking their way, half in hostility and half open-mouthed shock.

Duke deliberately pressed his fingers into Nathan's cheeks and shut his eyes, closing Garland out, concentrating on the familiar brush of stubble and warm, responsive lips -- as responsive as Nathan ever got, anyway.

He got about ten seconds before Nathan gave a shuddering breath into his mouth and pushed him away, saying, "Duke, stop. Not here, all right?" But that was about nine seconds more than he'd been expecting, and it made him feel better, in more ways than one.

Nathan shot his dad a stiff, uncompromising look, disengaged from Duke, and tested his legs in a few lunging strides to the window. He leaned down and picked up something Duke hadn't noticed before -- a crushed, broken cellphone that had ended up under an occasional table. Nathan pulled a sour face at the broken phone and turned back to where Garland waited. Unhappy reluctance coated his expression. He said thickly, blurting it out abruptly, "They took my gun."

"Well, we'll find them and it," Garland barked. "So don't fret on it."

Duke had a horrible feeling that was the old bastard's idea of 'consoling'.

"We'll find them," said Audrey, doing a _much_ better job. "Nathan..."

He swung around, tall and steady and poker-faced. His thin mouth starkly and fiercely shaped the words, "I'm fine." There was a challenge in there for anyone to even _dispute_ it. They could see the jagged row of stitches through the tears in his shirt, but sure, Nathan was _fine_.

"You're fine, and that's just dandy." Garland trudged fully into the room, making even Audrey jump as he suddenly scooted in behind her left shoulder, focused on Nate. "You're not working this case."

"Dad--" Nathan's hands bunched into fists at his sides and his jaw bulged, but even Duke could tell that was Garland's voice of really meaning it.

"There's not a chance I'm letting you near these people again, Nathan. What the hell did they just _see_?" The Chief gestured to Nathan's midriff and the room around them, which was still strewn with sawdust that a really good vacuum cleaner would need to get out of the carpets. "They know about you. Worse if you show up right as rain and... all sewn up. Now don't look at me like that and just be grateful I'm not taking you off duty again, hole that size in your body." Garland shook his head and snorted through his nose.

Nathan threw out his arms, rather dramatically for him, but then he did look pissed off.

"Oh...?" Audrey raised a perky hand, fingers waggling, trying to claim both men's attention back from the mutual death-glare they had going on. "Actually, we do already have a case. One of _our_ kind of cases, in fact. Back at the morgue with Julia."

"Fine, then you do that." Garland flapped a hand, then lit up and sucked on a cigarette with a bit too much gusto. The hand flap morphed into a more pointedly dismissing wave. "Go on. We'll do the police work."

"Nathan," Audrey said warningly. She pinned his gaze and he squashed whatever outburst had been teetering on the edge of his lips.

Garland hesitated a moment, then swung away, his silence as his eyes tried to pull away from Nathan more eloquent than any words he'd been able to muster. Not that Nathan noticed... He was far too incensed by the words.

Landon slipped back into the room in Garland's place, uncertain and hesitant as he looked at Nathan and then Duke, a more pensive frown than usual on his always-serious face. "I felt it," he admitted, returning to Nathan with a trace of guilt. "I didn't realise what it was until I got the call from Officer Parker, but I... _felt_ that something was wrong. With you. With one of my, uh, creations, at any rate."

" _You felt it_?" Duke repeated incredulously.

"Piper implied that she felt a connection with the animals... and you," Audrey said.

"We're connected?" Duke demanded flatly. This just got _better_ and _better_. And it was becoming steadily more annoying that he'd missed the original case where this taxidermy shit cropped up, given how he’d come to be so intimately acquainted with it later, and that Audrey and Nathan always seemed to have more familiarity with the horrible lie of the land than he did when _he_ was the one who got the full personal experience of it. "You've got to be kidding me."

"It could come in useful," Audrey said. "Next time something happens to one of you, at least we might know faster." She eyed Landon. "And you'll know who to call."

He nodded.

Duke watched Nathan's gaze flick from Landon to Audrey, still with that anger at his father, and it was impossible to make any guesses as to whether he was creeped out by the idea of this, the same way Duke was.

***

It was redundant to ask Nathan how he felt, and Duke had to wonder if his injury would have even hurt if it _hadn't_ been for his Trouble. He hadn't ever thought to ask Landon about that line of stitches on his own arm, but the taxidermist had never displayed any discomfort with it. _Duke_ hadn't hurt himself badly since he'd been like this. (Nathan was just a walking disaster area.) It seemed possible that injuries which cut through the encasing skin, through the 'magic', wouldn't be felt like living wounds. Even if Duke still felt bruises and scrapes and scuffs that didn't break through that outer casing to cause permanent damage.

He'd climbed in the back of Audrey's car to be with Nathan, but found that all his attempts at contact were met by rigid dismissal, and when he leaned in to push the issue, Nathan outright shook him off. "Not now, Duke."

Duke figured he was angry about letting someone get the jump on him and about his dad taking him off the case. Although even Duke could see how the latter made sense. In isolation, they could probably convince the crooks that they'd been seeing things. If the 'stuffed policeman' was around in full view of them it would make things trickier.

Nathan didn't even know the delights of their current Troubled case yet. But Duke, slighted by the physical rejection, left that for Audrey to tell him as they parked and walked back up to the morgue building.

Julia showed a disturbing amount of interest in Nathan's condition. All they'd asked for was bandages to cover up the stitched slice in his abdomen and offer a temporary solution to that 'extra support' issue Landon had mentioned. But she took the opportunity to poke and prod at him until Nathan removed her hands and backed off, fingers gripping the ends of the half-finished bandage, stating abruptly that he'd finish it himself.

While he did that -- and Audrey tentatively moved in to at least help feed the bandage around his back one more time -- his eyes occasionally slid up and fixed as if they could burn a hole through the morgue sheet covering the squat, plump shape still on Julia's table.

Duke wondered if Nathan was thinking the same things he was.

He pulled Julia aside, who rolled her eyes at him in what was setting in to be her typical attitude since her return to town. Duke took a deep breath and checked nervously again for the distance he'd drawn her from Nathan and Audrey, wondering if it really was far enough away from Nathan's bat ears.

"There's a Trouble that brings stuffed things to life," he said, and it came out in a rush, despite his attempts to get a grip on himself. "Before, I..." He closed his eyes, screwing his face up. Nathan had a fucking hole in his abdomen you could fit a fist inside, and it was sewn up, sure, but it wasn't going to _heal_. "How do you think this will work, if..." He gestured helplessly down at his own midriff with his hands, wincing profoundly at the idea of the damage.

Julia's eyebrows raised and she opened her mouth. What came out wasn't anything he'd anticipated. "You'd bring a kid in on this clusterfuck?" Her face screwed up and her finger waggled up and down his form. "To fix you?"

Duke gawped at her. Okay, he knew she considered him a bastard, and that did make it sound... bad... but this was life and death! It wasn't unreasonable to consider _just asking_. It wasn't! And that wasn't what he was asking _her_ , anyway.

"I'm talking about _Nathan_ ," he said, and the heat in his voice obviously made it carry, because at the other side of the room, Nathan and Audrey both looked up.

"If it would be a real wound?" Her lips pressed in unhappiness at the thought and she folded her arms and looked down, taking the question seriously. "You know this isn't exactly something I can give you a medical opinion on, Duke."

"But it seems... the most likely." He groaned and moved his hand over his mouth, catching most of the noise. _Jesus_. There was a possible solution to their situation -- maybe, because they still didn't know how this Trouble really worked, and while there was every chance it might be applicable, there was also a chance it might not --but did they dare even consider it? Was there any point trying to resolve this when there was a huge risk it would kill Nathan all the way?

Of course, _Duke_ could still take it.

They were in this together, Nathan kept saying, and that in a nutshell encompassed what had held Duke together through this mindfuck so far. Nathan's stated refusal to basically _look down_ was a little bit irrational in itself. Still... the fact he wasn't _alone_ , the challenge represented by Nathan's coping with the same conditions, the lure of Nathan in his bed... The combination of all those things had made the last few weeks possible to bear.

Nathan wouldn't resent it if Duke got fixed. _Duke_ was the one barely holding off his freakout on most days. Nathan was the one who could _cope_.

He didn't know if it was just his imagination or, well, his conscience, that the the expression on Julia's face was saying so hard, _You're disgusting_.

She shook her head determinedly and didn't say anything like that. Instead she hissed, "Since we don't know how it works yet, it's pointless to think about it. Meanwhile, I have the corpse of a teddy bear that I really don't know what to do with." She stalked to the table and threw the sheet back.

Nathan made a choked noise.

"Yeah," Audrey said wryly. "This town keeps getting more fun by the day."

"Tell me about it." Clamping the ends of the as-yet-unknotted bandage around his midriff in one hand, Nathan stepped up to the examination table. The teddy bear's insides were stripped partially open across the middle where the car had hit it. It was not so bloody as it had been earlier, after Julia's attentions, but Duke fought back the taste of vomit as he registered fully the parallel of having seen Nathan lying with his stuffing out all over that living room floor.

Nathan ducked his head back down to his bandage, almost reluctantly, but Duke thought he saw white around the edges of his eyes.

"Like us," Nathan said, nodding slowly. "But reversed."

***


	2. part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: For reference in this part, in dialogue, to sexual assault and to harm/torture inflicted upon a child. The context is _surreal_ and comic-bizarre, but I figure I should make mention of it.

There wasn't a whole lot of usefulness to take from the rest of the day. Nathan was terser than usual. Duke had a restaurant|bar to run and really shouldn't be hanging around a police station. He _definitely_ didn't want people to start seeing him as some kind of auxiliary cop, but like hell was he letting Nathan out of his sight, even if Nathan gave no sign of wanting him around. He did manage to press Audrey into a promise to stick to Nate like glue for half an hour while he borrowed her car and dashed out to check the vehicle license plate on the security footage at the _Gull_ and then conscientiously wipe the footage. He ensured everything was in hand with his staff, felt vaguely guilty for ducking out as he left, and cursed Bill McShaw a little bit at the back of his mind for making him _responsible_. He also picked up the Thing he'd asked Landon to arrange on his way back to the station.

Both new ongoing cases -- _Nathan's and Audrey's_ ongoing cases, even if half of that number was barred from one of them -- didn't produce much of anything for the rest of the day. The man who’d knifed Nathan had gone to ground. You had to wonder how he'd disappeared so thoroughly when Haven was so small and so nosy, but it seemed that it had happened. The Chief spent the afternoon charging around the station glaring at everyone like a man possessed.

It was the sort of reaction you could only get from someone who gave a damn, but there was no use trying to tell that to Nathan. At least, Duke wasn't going to bother. It was a relief when Audrey finally slapped the information from tracing the car down on the desk under her palm and announced, "Okay, I vote we call it a day. It's not a priority to approach this family today and I for one need to crash." She eyed the Chief storming across the Bullpen outside again, voice raised in crotchety impatience, and a frown took over her face. It was half past four, but considering the times she and Nathan kept on duty it was early. (Duke shuddered at the thought of _unpaid work_.)

Nathan opened his mouth but then hesitated, followed Audrey's gaze to Garland, and apparently concluded there was no particular reason to resist her.

Cupcakes, pink wine and Julia again, Duke was guessing on Audrey's part. He himself was planning on something a little stronger and a lot dirtier, Nathan willing. He wondered then if Julia and Audrey had ulterior motives, but concluded that it was probably unlikely unless a Trouble was turning the whole of Haven gay (which wasn't _actually_ beyond the realms of possibility).

"Awesome," Duke said. "You mind giving me and Mr. Chatty a ride?" He'd come from the _Gull_ in the morgue van with Julia and from Rowan Street in Audrey's car. Much to Nathan's disgust, no-one had been willing to let him drive, and his Bronco would still have to be picked up tomorrow.

"I'd just go home tonight," Nathan mumbled peevishly. "Except--"

"Do _not_ make me go crazy over this," Duke said.

Audrey rolled her eyes. "No, I think I'd be happier knowing you had someone with you tonight, Nathan. That whole thing back there was pretty scary."

" _Thank_ you," Duke said. He clapped Nathan on the shoulder as they stood up and herded him toward the exit. Nathan looked slightly mutinous and very bemused, and turned to mouth irritably at Duke, but then raised his hands and followed the guidance of the push on his shoulder. Audrey gave a small snort and the tension in her notably relaxed, watching them together. Duke only at the last moment remembered to snag his carrier bag from under the desk where he'd stashed it.

Nathan narrowed his eyes at the bag and said, as they headed along the police station corridors and left the building, "I'm not stupid, and you can forget it."

"What?" Duke bounced back at him with innocence.

Nate pressed his lips together and shook his head.

Audrey left them within sight of the _Gull_ with a parting shot of, "You guys try to chill, or... you know. However works best for you." And leaving that hanging, she drove away.

"You know," Duke said, poking Nathan in the back a few times; not so much for the non-reaction as the reassurance he was still there. "She's basically telling us to go fuck all night. How's that for validation?" They headed across to Duke’s truck and Duke felt his heart pounding a bit. He was seriously hoping that once he got him alone, Nate would quit being all standoffish and like the Nathan of old and let Duke _touch_ him properly.

"Yeah?" They flopped into the front of the truck. It wasn’t until ten minutes later, when they boarded the _Rouge_ when Nathan halted suddenly, turning in a rusted metal doorway. "It might not be the best of ideas, now. _This_ ," Nathan said grimly. "Sure, I came here. We need to talk about this."

 _Nathan_ needed to talk? Duke reached past him to shove on the handle. "You're kidding me." The last thing Duke felt like doing was talking. He cupped a hand over Nathan's crotch and pushed him back through the door via that contact. He kicked the door shut behind them and grabbed Nathan's collar as well, pinning him to the wall and making sure that even if the guy couldn't feel, there was no way he could escape the fact he was being thoroughly groped. He crushed Nathan's protest under his lips. His hand pushed up under Nathan's shirt and he felt bandaging rasp against his skin.

His freeze and slight pull back was involuntary. Nathan's eyes glittered coldly, regarding him in the dim light. Nate's hands had stayed held at his sides. Okay, Duke thought bitterly. Why resist when you could just shut down? Touch, sex, _feeling_ , it didn't work for Nathan unless he consciously engaged his imagination. "You're sure," Nathan caught up flatly, "that you still want to fuck me like this?" He said it in such a tone as to indicate that every expected answer was a variation on _no_.

"I want to fuck you like anything," Duke said. "But like right now most of all. Seriously, Nate--"

Nathan reached out and put a hand on his chest, which meant Duke couldn't get any closer, Nathan's arm a straightened bar between them. But Duke wasn't sure that part wasn't purely incidental, because Nathan had stopped and was just staring down at his hand.

Middle and ring finger were resting on bare skin at the 'v' of Duke's neckline. Duke resisted the urge to point out he'd not be able to feel a heartbeat even if Duke really had one and it wasn't just illusion. Patience bore out and after a moment, Nathan sighed and said, "I don't want to give this up."

"Then _don't_." Duke pressed his hand over Nathan's, weaving through the fingers with his own. "Nobody said anything about giving it up." All along, Nathan had been the steady one. Duke supposed that having a hole ripped through you and half your insides torn out would be enough to shake anyone. Especially, he thought with a cold roil in his stomach, when Nathan did not know how Duke was going to react to the state of his body now.

Duke didn't know either, and couldn't make any promises. Nathan was... really good at protecting himself via cutting himself off from the universe. "Stay, and give me chance to prove that this still works," Duke said. "Anyway, I was going to tell you, I got a thing--"

Nathan flicked his eyes up to the ceiling. "I _know_ , and if you expect me to _wear_..."

"It's totally manly," Duke said, hurriedly squirming out of Nathan's grasp and reaching for the bag he'd dropped on the floor when they stumbled in. "C'mon, please? I totally don't want you to break in half while we're having sex. That would be... about the world's worst mood killer." Duke swallowed, because it wasn't very funny, either.

"Duke," Nathan sighed, sounding tired and frustrated. "This is a lot to absorb. Do you ever stop and think that maybe this isn't the way to do it? I have to... to live with this, for want of a better word. Things have changed. I know you think you've got something to prove, but I need to feel normal right now."

It wasn't like Nathan not to want to deal with something head-on, but given the stresses of the day -- knifed, under threat, exposed as unnatural, sewn and patched back together and sent on his way like a torn shirt -- Duke could see how that would work. "Okay..." He took his hand out of the bag and hurled it through the nearest door (bedroom) with a sigh, before resuming, repentant, "I'll cook and we'll have a beer, maybe watch some football. Better?"

Nathan stiffly nodded.

Duke sighed as he turned away and walked heavily down to the galley, feeling the tension in his stomach setting in for the long haul. He hadn't really thought that the burning need he had to reaffirm their physical attraction might not be shared by Nathan. Then again, Nathan was the one facing the possibility that his body was too gross-out to seek solace in any more.

The way Nathan functioned, he'd rather reject Duke _first_ and never have to address the question at all than face an answer he didn't like. If Nathan needed some space to be normal, that was... okay, because they still didn't know but at least Nathan wasn't actively running away. He could do this. He could wait. It wasn't like they fell on each other immediately, anyway, most nights, but it was rare that the evening progressed without them doing anything. If he just let things take their course, hopefully habit would take over and he'd have his answer by the end of the night.

...If he wasn't able to wrap his head around this, he was going to feel like _such an asshole_.

Nathan became a bit more animated through dinner, because as a rule he enjoyed food. _Smell_ and _taste_ were the closest he had to concrete physical pleasure, and if Duke had thought about it, he could have tailored the meal to indulge those senses more, but he hadn't.

They turned the TV on and bitched about the sport between them. Bearing in mind Nathan's taste buds, Duke brought out a good wine he'd been saving, which Nathan didn't turn down; in fact, he gulped most of the first glass pretty quickly before it became clear the _taste_ had registered and he slowed down. Made those teasing movements of his mouth that meant he was rolling the flavours around his tongue. Duke shifted restlessly in his seat, full of heat and nerves and need. But the way he'd tossed back the wine suggested Nathan seriously needed to cut loose and he wondered if instead he should drag out a cheaper, guilt-free bottle. Or several.

Except Nathan had started shooting his way that covertly hungry look he had, the slightly cool and removed one that said, _I totally want it even if I don't know why since I can't actually feel it._ And at the same time sort of purred, _I'll totally do you_ , capping with the proviso of, _But I can take or leave you._

It was Nathan who stood up and turned the television off, circling the last of the wine from his glass around his mouth. He turned back to Duke, letting his hands fall to his sides, where his fingers rubbed reflexively together. "All right."

"Oh, thank God." Duke practically dived at him, helped by tripping headlong over a chair leg. Nathan caught him around the chest, so he took that and ran with it. He craned his head back and up, his forward-leaning position creating an oddity of angle where Nathan seemed a lot taller, and kissed Nathan like he'd damn well break through his curse and make him feel it, sucking tongue into his mouth and battling hard. Nathan's teeth sunk into his lip, but he didn't let that deter him, since it was probably accidental. He scrabbled his feet back under him properly for balance and slid his hand along Nathan's ribs with purpose.

 _Don't freak out_ , he told himself, cursing himself thoroughly for any appearance of squeamishness. _Don_ ' _t freak the fuck out!_ Nathan didn't know where the hand was. He could use this time to get used to it. He forced himself not to react as his fingers brushed the bandaging. He smoothed his palm over the area he knew covered the damage as he tasted every part of Nathan's mouth. He forced his brain to accommodate the idea of the damage beneath his palm, to shove out once and for all the sickening reality it represented, and focus only on the fact it was part of _Nathan_.

By the time he pulled back from the kiss, his fingers reaching for Nathan's shirt buttons, he thought he had it.

Nathan went for his hands as he got the second button, catching them and dragging them both clear. His expression was pinched and uncertain. "Are you sure about this?"

"We have to get to the moment of truth sometime. Can't just say we're gonna do it half-dressed from now on."

"No, but we could do that tonight." Nathan's face was stiff. "You have issues. I get that. You don't need to be reminded what we are. I know it's not the same as rejecting _me_."

Except it would be the same outcome, so Duke had to face this, else he'd lose Nathan, the only thing that had helped him keep going this long. It would be small repayment to turn his back on Nathan now. "Fuck this."

He pushed his hands back and unpeeled another button. Nathan's hands, working from the bottom, were shaking almost as much as Duke's were. Duke got the last button and yanked the ends of the shirt apart, lowered his face to Nathan's chest, and kissed a path down it.

He got his fingers into the edge of the bandage and pulled at it, but Julia and Nathan had done a secure job and it wasn't going to be that easy. Duke groaned. "We need scissors. And I think that we should probably be in the bedroom." Now he came to look, there was already an occasional table tipped over and who knew how many sharp edges they could have bashed against?

"Fuck." But there was something about straight-laced Detective Wuornos with foul words on his tongue. Nate walked Duke backward to the table where they'd eaten and picked up a sharp knife. He poked the edge under the bandages.

"Shit, Nate," Duke hissed through his teeth. "You want _more_ sets of stitches?"

The bandages were already peeling away in big loops. Duke could see the upper edge of the jagged, sewn slit. Worse than he remembered. Nathan slapped the knife back on the table and yanked on Duke's wrists, pulling him towards the bedroom. The stitches glared out from his chest.

Duke said, "I want you in ways so dirty I've only ever seen them before in porn."

"Romantic," Nate put in wryly.

"You better believe it. Things I wouldn't _dare_ mention to any girlfriends I've ever had."

"That doesn't seem very fair." Nathan's mockery was a thin coating over fear. Duke leaned in and pressed another kiss to silence it, unable to listen further. He _made_ his fingers touch the stitches, absorb the feel of the edges where it still felt like dead skin -- where it _was_ dead skin. Unreal. The faint fluffy trace of a few trapped threads of the stuffing inside. Duke's stomach turned somersaults. He made an involuntary noise into Nathan's mouth.

He'd stopped them outside the door, but he bundled Nathan in now, toward the bed, desperately trying not to think. "Love you," he said thickly, in a burst of defiant inspiration. "Love you. It's okay. You don't have to say it back." He kissed Nathan's surprise-slacked jaw.

Nathan recovered to grip Duke's sides with a rib-constricting clench of both hands. "Shut the fuck _up_."

Duke tripped him backwards onto the bed. Nathan landed with his elbow on rustling plastic and turned to see what had made the noise. His face froze and he flung the bag at Duke, who'd carelessly tossed it there earlier, at the point where he'd been hoping to approach Nathan with it when he was in a better mood. The bag slapped him in the face and dropped down into his clutching hands.

"What part of _no_ is so damned hard to--" But Nathan fell silent as Duke pulled the contentious item out of the bag, shook it out and held it up against his front. Nathan stared at it a moment before granting a moody, "Huh."

"Not what you were expecting" And maybe he _shouldn't_ have made all the jokes about lace and leather and fainting ladies. Granted, that was his fault. But they both had their ways of dealing with the world, and when he had to joke about a thing...

The male corset was basically a neoprene-and-velcro belly-band that Landon had picked up from the sports shop in Camden. "It's for extra exercise support," Duke said, chucking it back to Nathan. "Against injury. Because of injury. Some athletes wear them as a matter of course. I figure that's what you need for that tear, right?"

Nathan had gone tight-mouthed but he rolled up and scraped off the last of the bandages The jagged stitches sort of hit Duke in the face. He couldn't help but flinch, and Nathan's eyes tracked it. They narrowed a bit, and Nathan shrugged all the way out of his shirt, and unfastened his trousers to shuck them down an inch or two over his hips before he wrapped the band around his waist.

"Here," Duke said hoarsely, moving forward as the stitches disappeared. He knelt on the bed and leaned forward to slip his fingers inside the band and check the tension. He tightened the velcro fastening a little more, and trailed his fingers over the black material, checking that it was reinforcing where it ought to be. "Least you won't break in half when I fuck you, now."

Nathan snorted. "I could..." Threat bubbled under the surface of those words, but the problem was solved and he let it go, grabbing Duke and rolling atop him with a growl. "You couldn't say 'it's a fucking sports appliance' instead of talking about _ribbons_?"

"You can get things custom made on the internet." Duke's voice rose to a yelp as Nathan pinned and flattened him. "And I think we should, you know, because I think you can do better. You would totally rock a slim, girlish waistline..."

Nathan yanked Duke's jeans down to mid-thigh, underwear and all, and tongued the end of Duke's cock, causing him to yelp for real. He closed his lips around the tip a moment, pressing them hard and then dragging backward, drawing out an unmanly squeak. Was this punishment for the shit over the corset? Duke whimpered obligingly. The next moment, Nathan took him deep in all his lack-of-gag-reflex disdain. He nestled his head and inhaled deliberately through his nose. Scent. Taste… _Holy..._ Nathan still had hold of Duke’s wrists, and with his pants around his thighs and Nathan's weight on his legs, he was pretty much at Nathan's mercy.

He felt teeth and flinched. Nathan’s impossible blowjobs could also be pretty hazardous. Although he still couldn’t say whether this was punishment or just Nathan well and truly ducking out of any conversation.

Duke moaned as Nathan slid back along his shaft, and he got a longer slice of that unintentional tooth -- had to be unintentional, Nathan couldn't gauge it deliberately with that kind of precision. "Jesus, _fuck_. Mind your teeth, you _bastard_."

"Mf," Nathan grunted back, not sounding particularly sorry, but who could really tell? His eyes looked positively demonic as he lifted them a second before sliding down again -- teeth in check this time -- over Duke's whole length to the root. He growled deep back there and made Duke thrust hard without thought. Nathan made a constricted noise that... well, it didn't actually sound great, but then he just growled harder. He let go of Duke's arms to transfer his grip to Duke's hips and, a second later, his balls.

"Augh!" Duke's hands flew to the back of Nathan's head automatically, though he wasn't sure what they were gonna do there. Pull him off? Push him down? Neither seemed a great option, so really the illusion of having any degree of control back was _just that_. Nate's hair felt soft and his scalp slightly sweaty. Duke scraped his fingers through it, groaned again at Nathan's next move, and tried to spread his legs wider for greater access, but the jeans weren't a help with that. He ground his ass against the bed and thrust as much as he dared at the same time, which had the dual purpose of a vent for his desperation and of sliding the jeans further down his thighs. He felt Nathan's stubble against tender flesh as he settled his legs further apart, before Nathan's tongue pushed flat and rough against the underside of his cock and fingers massaged his balls and all he could do was hang on. Nathan's throat might've got a rough ride for a few seconds but it was his own damn fault.

Nate interrupted the torture to join in hauling at Duke's jeans, hands shoving the annoying denim down to ankle level, where it met the insurmountable barrier of Duke's shoes, but at least that was _some_ more movement. Duke sat up a bit more, curled his bent knees around Nathan's ears and laced both hands in Nathan's hair. Nathan lifted his head slightly and even if he couldn't speak, his eyes fucking _dared_ Duke on.

The teasing had gone on long enough Duke slid his hands down to the back of Nathan's neck, drawing those sneering eyes down again. "Get back there where you belong." His voice was breathy, although the embarrassing squeak hadn’t been the effect he'd been going for. But he felt his cock hit the back of Nathan's throat and heard it in the discomforted noise he made trying to draw breath. He would have pulled back, but Nate clenched both hands on his buttocks and emphatically would not let himself be pulled back. Duke gave in and thrust. The sensation of Nathan's throat struggling to pull in air around his shaft was the last straw. Nathan's sounds grew wet and strained. He dribbled fluids past his lips back onto Duke's crotch as he moved to pull back and they both realised Duke's fingers were still clamped together around his head.

"Shit!" Duke moved his hands and let Nathan pull clear, face red and struggling to swallow. He managed a couple of convulsive gulps and then heaved for breath, wiping the back of his hand across his lips. Duke winced, half dying (again) in lust at the sight and half just plain alarmed. "Too far?"

Nathan's reply was rough when it came, but that was the state of his throat and not the state of his mood. "Not remotely. Anything else I can do to stop you treating me like glass?" ...Mostly not the state of his mood.

Nathan scrubbed at his face again with his fingers, then looked at his fingers. Duke decided that maybe Nate had it right and not-talking was the best approach after all. He squirmed around -- goddamned jeans still sealed around his feet -- and kissed Nathan a lot more gently than any of that had been, on the lips, and then licking his way around his mouth and chin, trying to ignore the taste of himself and the rasp of stubble on his tongue.

He pushed on Nathan's upper chest with both hands: _lie down_. Then he was forced to actually turn and deal with the problem of his shoes and jeans. He hurled everything onto the floor. When he turned around, Nathan was exploratively poking and stretching at the corset while he lay on his back, testing the strength and give in the material, twisting his body and watching how it moved around him.

"So...?" Duke prompted, breaking the silence, tickling a finger down the back of one of Nathan's tugging hands.

"I can live with it," was the Wuornos judgement. "Annoying that it's permanent."

"Unless..." Duke began, thinking of living-dead teddy bears opened up on a morgue slab.

"I heard your conversation with Julia. I'd rather be alive like this than bleeding out. Not asking the kid to try and fix it." He gave Duke a hard look, but it wasn't _exactly_ forbidding Duke to do anything of the sort himself. Which didn't really help his conscience.

"Our timing always sucks."

"Not _always_." Nathan reached out and hauled Duke on top of him. "How long do you need?" His eyes slid down impatiently to Duke's spent cock.

"Longer than that."

But Nathan's cock was hard as Duke moved down his body to undress the rest of him, sliding off his jeans -- still no underwear, and how the hell had he actually managed to forget about that? What a fucking day. He wondered if Audrey or Landon had noticed while they were stitching Nathan up earlier. He tugged loose Nathan's shoes and socks and threw everything to join his own on the floor.

It did look a bit weird to turn back and see his partner lying clad in nothing but the sports corset.

Duke leaned down and kissed the clean skin above the band, but Nathan only gave him a hard look for it, and he supposed he was fooling no-one. "I still want you even if I'm freaked out by this," he said, a little shakily. "I don't want to lose you over this crap."

"This crap is the only reason you had me in the first place," Nathan reminded him, rolling up onto his knees on the bed. He pressed against Duke upright front to front, cock brushing lightly between Dukes thighs. "Unless you think some other disaster would have come along to drive us back into each other's arms."

"Bound to." Duke shrugged, feigning nonchalance, as Nathan's hands travelled over his body. "Haven."

Nathan slid a hand between his legs. He wasn't ready again yet, though that _definitely_ provided the first stirrings. "Bend over..." And apparently Nathan wasn't waiting. Duke watched the corset hug his midriff as he flexed his whole body, rolling to retrieve the lube from the night stand, and he really wanted to beg Nathan to be careful, but he also knew how badly that conversation went.

Nathan coiled around him from behind, and a finger scored his ass without fumbling, straight up. Duke gave a muffled grunt. Nathan pressed a hand to his belly, chest flush against Duke's back, and repeated in his ear, "I said _bend over_." His voice was all sandpaper and glass. Nathan curled forward with insistent force. With his body covering Duke's, the movement curled Duke under him. He moved a little too quick and ready and Duke had to put out his arms to catch their balance.

"Hey," he said, voice constricting as Nathan eased another lubed finger inside him. "Bit less on the crazy?"

"You wanted dirty things." Nathan managed to chew that phrase up like a real prude even in the current circumstances. "We haven't even begun."

"You sound like a schoolmarm," Duke pointed out breathlessly, because Nathan's fingers were scissoring. "Hey, thought of another idea about that corset... we should totally get you a whip to go with it."

"I'll do it the day you wear a collar." Nathan added another finger. It was probably just as well that prevented Duke from offering that it might not be as near impossible as Nathan seemed to think. He was open to ideas.

He managed to gasp, "Handcuffs. I _know_ you just _love_ me in handcuffs."

Nathan's fingers left his ass, his hands crept around to tweak Duke’s cock and then slid up over his chest. Then he gripped Duke by the shoulders and his cock opened Duke up, all the way in with practiced power. _Jesus_ , Nathan and muscle memory. Duke was increasingly sure that people shouldn't be able to do the things he did on the compromised information he had. It had been far more awkward at first, and that said things about Nathan's capacity to compensate that kind of terrified him. " _That_ ," Duke grunted. "Do that again." Nathan could replicate a given movement into infinity, and proceeded to do that until they were shuddering, panting and barely holding their weight up on the bed.

"You think I need cuffs to control you?" Nathan panted in his ear.

"Fuck you," Duke groaned rebelliously.

"Next," promised Nathan, before changing the angle just enough to ensure conversation became a thing seriously no longer happening.

Duke’s brain was half melted on the floor by the time Nathan lifted his head from chewing on his shoulder and pulled out, rasping, "Swap." Duke turned and saw that he'd fallen back onto his elbows, offering his body front-on.

"Lube," said Duke with sudden desperation, turning around and searching for it with one hand on himself and one on Nathan. Nathan craned his neck and his arm scrabbled back and to one side. The lube bounced off Duke's chest before he could disengage a hand to catch it. "Ow. You are a serious dick tonight, you know that?"

Nathan answered with his body.

Duke swore, feeling like he was going to explode if he wasn't _in_ Nathan _now_. "If this was your plan, you do know _preparation_ isn't called that for nothing?" He managed to get his lubed fingers into Nathan's ass with while Nathan’s movements were all-out as if trying to get him to do it dry, and to grab another daub from the lube before Nathan knocked it out of his hand. It bounced somewhere across the floor. "Asshole!"

"Yesssss," hissed Nathan, twisting and losing Duke’s fingers.

Duke groaned at the pun and smacked his offered buttocks. Nathan grabbed his hand and yanked him off-balance, face falling into the cave of Nate's neck, dick to ass-crack. " _All right_ ," Duke growled. He managed to get his slick hand in again. "Nathan, do _not_ make me skimp."

"Skin heals," Nathan grunted. "I can’t feel it anyway."

Duke managed to work him a little more, but waiting much longer was officially Not A Thing. Nathan's legs were kind of in the way _and_ pulling at him, and then his cock was sinking in. He managed to hold in place several seconds despite Nathan's swearing and resistance, then rocked back and forth gently until he'd eased his path. Nathan lay back and groaned, arching his damaged midriff and chest, shoving up on to Duke. Duke's eyes fixed on the corset, shifting with the force of their activity, and his rocking movements abruptly ceased.

Nathan's eyes lifted and set on him with gleaming annoyance. "Move, damn you."

"No, wait, I--" Duke darted his hand forward and pried the edge of the corset back to expose the stitching, proving that it was still intact. "This is madness. We don't know how much pressure that can take."

"So we're stress-testing," Nathan rasped. "Better here than in the middle of chasing down some crook or Trouble."

Duke supposed he had a point, although if this went wrong he was never going to be over the trauma. He worked the neoprene back into place then returned his grip to keeping Nathan's legs out of his face. He took a deep breath. Nathan's hips rolled at him impatiently and he bore down hard. "Feel that?" he demanded with shaky sarcasm.

"Not yet. Keep trying." Nathan's grin was suddenly huge and crooked. Duke had an abrupt blinding flash of just how far they'd come if they could _joke_ about it.

 _Stress-testing_ , he thought, and then realised, too, how relatively easily he'd exposed the stitching in his concern. Maybe it wasn't just the limits of his body that Nathan wanted stress-testing.

But with that license, Duke let go. Nathan desperate to cut loose wasn't a sight that anyone saw too often. Was it purely for effect that Nathan flung back his head and cried out as Duke screwed him into the bed, or part of spinning the experience into the fabric of his imagination? Usually he was pretty quiet, but then it had been a _bitch_ of a day.

Nathan came over Duke's chest and his own, making things slippery between them for the last few moments. He continued to shout and thrust himself onto Duke as his brain failed to catch up to his body, and Duke was caught up in the sweat and slick and force. But it wasn't long before he, too, flopped forward. "Jesus Christ, I can barely _see_. Shit, Nathan."

Nathan whuffed laughter, midriff rising and falling underneath him. Except that made Duke realise he was lying with his full weight on Nathan's belly, and probably shouldn't be.

He pried himself up, body barely cooperating. On his hands and knees, he tried to straddle Nathan, who seemed to be sprawling everywhere around and in-between him, and managed to balance enough to get his hands on the front-fastening velcro of the corset. He pulled the edges apart. Nathan was listless and slit-eyed, watching him with suspicion.

The bared line of stitches was just the same as it had been so far as Duke could tell. "Stress-testing," he groaned, and let his head sag back on his neck in relief. He rolled it around to glare into Nathan's frowning gaze. "You're fine. Why the hell do I let you do this to me?"

"Because you _love_ me," Nathan mumbled, though he kept it quiet enough and his voice was sufficiently fucked up that the exact sentiment in there was hard to define.

So that _had_ gone in, even if it had been met by "shut up". Duke wasn't sure whether to be pleased or panicked that Nathan was going to remember it. He crawled clear and collapsed next to Nathan on the bed, and simply didn't say anything. After a moment, he felt fingers trail down his arm and turned his averted face back to Nathan. Blue eyes blinked at him, bright and oddly soft. But Nathan was the poster boy for 'undemonstrative' and that was all he got.

"What time is it?" Nathan asked, a moment later, sitting up in a sort of shuffle-and-roll that _must_ put stress on his abdomen -- and Duke suddenly realised that this was going to be his new horrible obsession.

He rolled his head back, trying not to think about Nathan's every move and what might actually tear a stitch. "Something like nine."

Nathan was quiet a moment, sitting up, knees bent outwards and hands dangling in his lap. "I bet Audrey went back to work the case."

Duke hadn't really thought about it. He'd been assuming cupcakes. But now he considered it, yeah, he could see her doing just that after she'd dropped them off. Someone had knifed her partner today, and Garland hadn't technically taken her off the investigation, just Nathan. As soon as she'd ditched Nathan... "All right, maybe she did. But please tell me you're not thinking of going back and joining her."

Nathan shook his head. "If I'd been real, I'd definitely be in the hospital or the morgue right now. Better not to give those crooks any further reason to confirm what they saw. Besides, I think this evening's rightly a time-out, don't you?"

Duke shuddered. "Do you want to do anything else?" he asked. His balls ached, but maybe he could work up to another round with persuasion and sufficient time.

"Do you?" Nathan reflected back to him.

"Turn in early." Duke considered. "Hold you."

"Well... Not like the comfort-toy act disturbs my sleep." Nathan was laughing at him, damn it. What the hell would it take for the guy to come out of that defensive shell?

Even as he thought that, Nathan's words recalled to his mind the teddy bear from earlier. He wondered if Nathan's closeness would be enough to hold back the dark tide of his thoughts and the waiting nightmares, tonight.

***

"You two look better," was Audrey's first observation the next day. Duke saw the fashion in which her face cleared from concern to a wide grin as she saw them, and her voice brought out that teasing tone. They'd got a few stares on their way in, notably a piercing one from Garland through his office windows. "How's the--" Audrey sketched out the general position of Nathan's wound with her fingers. She mouthed not very quietly at Duke, "Is he wearing the--?"

Nathan tugged the end of his shirt up to reveal a slice of the actual corset and she looked distinctly disappointed by its unremarkableness.

"Yeah, I know," Duke said. "I told him he can do better."

"You can both stop it," Nathan said, making his _why are you supposed to be my friends_? face. "I'm fixed. We... made sure it was secure. It's easier to keep covered up than the other one is, even." Talking about the little slice on his arm, Duke understood, after a double-take and an annoyed glare.

"Secure, huh?" said Audrey, showing her teeth in her smile. "Tested it good and proper?"

Nathan, stuffed, unfeeling, and uptight all, could still blush horrendously. Duke smirked at him, then raised his hands from the reaction he got. "Hey, it's you who said it." But Audrey dared the Wuornos death-glare to sidle up and give him a squeeze on the arm (through his shirt) as she handed a coffee over in her other hand. "Hey, I was worried about your numb ass. You're not gonna leak if I give you this, right?"

Nathan grabbed the coffee but looked faintly pleased. Duke _had_ noticed that Audrey no longer touched him skin to skin. Not since she'd found out. Which was of the good, because it wasn't that Nathan didn't _like_ it, but he'd said that the experience of feeling again made him get weird and obsessive, and it had been preying on him and screwing up his partnership with Audrey. Duke privately thought Nathan was a little crazy not to have gone for that one: one woman in the world he could feel and all. But Nathan had mumbled something about using her and 'not being fair' and Duke wasn't stupid enough to weigh in with his honest opinion if Nathan of his own free will was going to choose a guy he couldn't feel over a girl he could.

"Thanks." Nathan's voice was especially hoarse as he toasted her with the coffee to indicate how _totally_ it was the drink he was thanking her for.

"Sure," she said, "and you guys are twenty minutes late, so it's definitely safe to drink now, by the way."

"Stabbed yesterday," Nathan reminded. "So, uh, how are things going on that?" They both knew they hadn't got the perpetrators yet; that much had already been volunteered by the grim looks and headshakes from three officers they'd met on the way into the station.

"Garland's on it like an obsession."

"Any leads?" Nathan reached for a file, illicitly.

"You remember the part where it's not our case, right?" Audrey responded as he turned over the file only to discover a series of photos of the roadkill teddy.

"Yeah, but we don't believe Audrey Parker stands for that for more than one minute," Duke said. "I bet you've got one of those creepy clipping-walls back at your B&B already."

Prepared to watch closely for her answer to that, he was foiled by the interruption of Laverne the radio operator blaring over the intercom. "Got a case looks like it's one for the 'Haven Special' team, Nathan hon, Officer Parker."

"What's that, Laverne?" Nathan had to swallow his mouthful of coffee to speak.

"Thirteen year old kid found tied to his bed this morning. Genital torture. Says--"

"Oh my God," Audrey said. "That's _awful_. But--"

"--A Haven thing?" Nathan caught up with clear confusion.

"That's right." And Laverne's smoky _chirp_ on the delivery was far too chirpy for the subject matter. "He says his sister's Barbie doll did it."

Duke choked.

Audrey shut her eyes and sighed. "Let me guess," she said drolly. "7 Benson Lane."

"How'd you know that, Audrey?" Laverne asked, but kind of like she was just entering into the humour of things by feeding her the line.

"Because that's where we were headed this morning anyway." She grabbed up her jacket. "C'mon, Nathan. Duke -- you saw that bear while it was, well, _alive_ , so you're with us."

"I am," Duke said, unenthused. He'd only come to the station to see Nathan was okay there, and he wanted to cry _unfair!_ But on the other hand, he didn't really want to let Nathan out of his sight today, either.

"Can we get any help for the kid?" Audrey was asking. "Is it bad?"

"Superficial, at least physically," Laverne said.

"Find a psychiatrist to call in on this one," Nathan said with an understated shudder. "In the meantime, we'll get over there."

"She's in on all this, right?" Duke asked as the intercom silenced. Audrey and Nathan just cast him unfathomable looks and turned and started walking. "Fine, be like that!"

They filed out of the door, Duke trailing behind both of them as they entered their more intense cop!mode and the sort of patter that made him feel like a spare part. "I guess I'm glad we already know this one's a Trouble," Audrey concluded, wincing. "Otherwise I'd have to be thinking about the parents right now and whether this story about Barbie isn't in place of a real tale even more horrible."

"Don't know how much better off the kid will be," Nathan supplied dubiously. "Shit. If we'd dealt with this yesterday, maybe--"

"Don't." Audrey shook her head at him. " _Knifed_ , Nathan. You had enough on your mind yesterday." Her face twisted in distaste. "I know what we're going to need to treat this as in the official report, either way."

"Toys attacking kids..." Nathan mused.

"What _will_ this town think up next, huh?" Duke put in, shaking his head.

***

The kid lived at a little blue-painted house clinging to one of Haven's steeper hills. There was a swing hung from a tree in the yard, and small bicycles in the driveway, and it had that lively, happy sort of look that Duke had always associated with other people’s families. Inside, a red-faced teenage boy hunched on a sofa, sullen and intractable, being fussed over by a woman with severely tied-back hair who was wearing large gold earrings with a business suit. The man Duke had met in the parking lot of the _Gull_ the day before was standing with his arms folded, looking by turns cross, shifty, and rather nervous. A little girl in a pink t-shirt, and jeans with flower patches sewn onto them, wandered around the sidelines with a pensive little face. She clutched a teddy bear almost as large as she was that was markedly less battered than the one in the morgue had been even before the car had done its work.

When the guy saw Duke, his face cleared in relief. Duke flashed him what he hoped was a knowing but cautionary look. He didn't want to start rehashing the day before in front of the rest of the family until they knew the situation.

"He was just... _tied_... to the bed," the mother said to Audrey. "With a _skipping rope_ and a _slinky_! Gagged with his own _socks_! And his -- his--" Her hands gestured helplessly. "There were _pins_ from a sewing kit! And a _clothes peg_ on it! I don't know how they got in. The window was locked. The whole house was locked. Nobody heard _anything_. I'm a light sleeper, even if my husband is not."

"I told you," the kid mumbled. "The toys did it." He looked at a toybox in the corner and shuddered all over.

"Now he's in denial!" the mother said. "It's just _awful_ , Officer Parker. You have to do something. If people can just break into houses and molest children--"

Nathan was right there and probably more kid-friendly than Audrey, if truth be known, but the mother was dead-focused on the female officer.

"All right," Audrey said, reaching up to pat a besuited shoulder and then thinking better of it before the other woman noticed. "I'll get... Jeremy's... statement..." She shot a slightly uncomfortable glance at Nathan. "You guys take a look at his room."

"I'll show you up," the father volunteered quickly. "Annie, you just come up to your own room a while, honey. You can play with Bear. We'll get your cheerios after that." He took the little girl by the hand, Bear dragging behind her from the other, and led the procession up the steps. He guided the little girl to the first door they came to, then took Duke and Nathan onward, keeping his silence yet because the landing and stairwell had no intervening doors from the downstairs of the house.

It wasn't until they were closed inside a mid-sized boy's room that the father turned to them with relief. There was a garish zombie-horror-movie design on the bedspread and similarly lurid movie posters on the walls, but a clutter of toys and games on the floor obviously spanned a number of years and a few items seemed likely to be Jeremy's sister's, although who knew, right? "You have no _idea_ how glad I am to see you. It's Cerise who called the police. If only I'd been the one to come in to wake Jeremy up. But she won't hear that Annie's Troubled. She won't hear about the Troubles at all. I _know_ the toys did this. So do you... don't you?" The guy clutched Duke's arms earnestly, and then seemed to remember Nathan and turned to him in worry.

"It's all right, Mr--" Shit, what was the family's name. "Uh, Mark. This is... my partner. My Troubled partner. Remember?"

The guy blinked. "I'd assumed... I thought you were a barman."

"I am a barman," Duke said with irony, and confirmed, patting Nathan's arm, "My _partner_."

"He's _not_ a cop, Mr Ripley," Nathan said wryly and with unnecessary emphasis. "And you thought right. But that's beside the point. I understand about the Troubles, and I _am_ a cop, but if your wife continues to press this, it's going to make things very difficult. In the meantime, where's the toy that did this?"

Mr. Ripley turned and waved his hands at a messy corner. "He swears it was his sister's Barbie that was the ringleader. There's more than one of them."

There was only one on the floor, though, naked and straggle-haired, sprawled face-down with limbs bent at awkward angles. Nathan tentatively ventured closer, poked it with the toe of his boot, then picked it up. He straightened out its limbs gently and looked vaguely embarrassed at having to touch its featureless plastic boobs. He brushed the hair back out of its face with his finger. "It's just a toy, now."

Ripley sighed. "I don't know how it works. I've _seen_ them, though."

"I've seen _Toy Story_ ," Duke said poking at Barbie in Nathan's hands. "They sham. Watch it, Nate."

"I guess if we have confirmation from the kid that it was this one, we can take it away and... shut it in a locked box, or something..." Nathan looked like he was floundering a bit. "We can get counselling for Jeremy whether this is treated as a criminal offence or not. But if Mrs Ripley continues with--"

"Oh, she's not my wife." Ripley shook his head. "Uh. Well. Not any more, at least. My second wife... left. Cerise came back to help take care of the children. I -- we might be -- it's complicated."

"I thought you said your wife was dead?" Duke picked up, suspiciously remembering something he'd rattled off in their previous encounter.

"I... can we _please_ not get into it?" Ripley squeezed his eyes shut and averted his face. "It doesn't matter anyway. It's my family that's Troubled. Although I've never had it, and nor has Jeremy. I'll talk to her, anyway."

They heard a little voice calling, "Daddy!" from a few rooms over, and Mark apologised and hurriedly went to deal with his daughter. Duke and Nathan looked at each other. Nathan said, "I don't get the impression he's trying to use the Trouble to cover up abuse that he's done. There's no way he could predict people turning up who already knew about the bear." He cast around the room and held Barbie out at arm's length. "I can't believe this ends up being a _dangerous_ Trouble. Toys coming to life is every kid's fantasy."

"It's not dangerous," Duke agreed, "unless you're a little perv who sleeps in the same room as your victims."

Nathan stared at him and Duke took Barbie from his hand; held her up. "Anatomically incorrect, but like we cared at that age? What's she doing in his room to start with? See, I _remember_ what I used to get up to with my -- with girls' dolls."

Nate snorted. He already knew this: Duke had stolen a couple of dolls from a girl at school and it had become kind of a thing for him, for a while. He'd even drawn little genitals and nipples on them with a fine marker pen.

"Anyway, my point _is_ , I shudder to imagine anything that suddenly thinks and feels being treated the way any improbably-proportioned small, naked female mannequin in a teenage boy's hands would--"

Barbie bit him.

Duke _howled_. As the state of the bear after the car accident flashed before his eyes, he managed not to drop her onto the floor five feet below, but it was a close thing. Little hands pried at the inside of his fingernail and tiny teeth ravaged the flesh on his finger. "You freakin' little bitch!" he yelped, hushing his voice quickly to a hiss. "What the hell did you do that for?"

" _Men!_ " a scornful little high-pitched voice said. "You're all the same. It's disgusting." At least she had to unhitch her teeth to talk, but she was still savaging his cuticle. Nathan, pulling a face, reached out and grabbed her around the middle. She beat at his hand with her little fists, legs kicking ineffectually. Her head shook side-to-side, tossing her hair, and her little nipple-less cleavage even kind of bounced and Duke abruptly felt... _bad_.

"Jeremy's just a kid," Nathan said, turning the living doll up to face him. "You stuck _pins_ in him?"

 _Ouch_. That one struck a little close to home for Duke.

"That bastard deserved it! Assault! Degradation! Depravity! I'm the victim here!"

"And the _clothes_ _peg_?" Nathan snarled. Barbie's pointy fingertips were drawing blood but he was indifferent to the tiny woman.

"It made my arms _ache_ to move that spring. But it was worth it! Hah! Will the shitty kid do that again? No! _See_!"

"He's a child. You're not even real." Nathan's face twisted. "At least... you're not supposed to be real. And he had no idea, right?" He turned helplessly to Duke, who shrugged. Because if this family _did_ know that the toys had a tendency to get up and move around when nobody was watching...

"Kids are assholes. Who knows? I'd be more cautious if I knew my sister's toys came to life."

"We already know what _you_ did," Nathan said wryly.

"Yeah!" put in Barbie. She threw a piece of fluff at Duke.

"Jesus!" It wasn't the impact of the fuzzy ball that cranked up Duke's stress levels but the sudden realisation where it had come from. "Shit, Nathan. That bitch has mined right down to stuffing."

Barbie pulled out another piece of fluff and gawped at it "Wait. Humans... don't do that." Then she got more incensed. "I'm not real? _I'm_ not real?! Fake people! Fake people!"

Duke grabbed her and closed a hand around her head. "Shut... _up_ ," he hissed. Nathan was poking at his hand in dismay, but it was a tiny hole, and it had taken Barbie's tiny hands to pull stuffing out of it. It wasn't seeping any more, or in need of any urgent attention.

Duke could feel Barbie fighting and struggling inside his closed fists, and _yeah_ , he felt bad, _he_ felt like a fucking _heel_. She was making "mf!" noises that were increasingly sounding like little sobs and her struggles were weakening. "Okay, okay, okay," he burst out, loosening his hands for just a moment, then tightening them again. "I want to let you out. But you need to _behave_ and you need to be _quiet_."

"Is that a good idea?" Nathan asked, still glaring at his hand and very surly.

"She's a fraction the size of us, and _naked_ , and the little fucker did assault her. It's sick."

"She's a toy," he hissed back.

"So are we!"

"Speak for _yourself_." Nathan shook his head and half turned away, the line of his shoulders expressing his displeasure.

Duke scowled and let go anyway. He offered the palm of his hand for Barbie to climb onto, and she swung over and scampered up his sleeve to his shoulder, then twisted her hands into his collar. After a moment, it became clear she wasn't strong enough to twist it hard enough to constrict his breathing, and he relaxed his abrupt panic and stopped pawing at her. He laughed instead. "What are you trying to do, nine-inch-girl?"

She bit his ear and Duke yelled and cursed and flailed again. " _I don't like you_ ," she said. "You're just like _him_. And _you_! You're going to put me in a box and lock me away!"

"Get off him or I'll do it now," Nathan said.

It really did feel horribly like bullying, but Duke still flailed and flattened his hand protectively over his ear before he said, "Leave her alone."

"She's feral," Nathan pointed out, "and you _can't keep her_."

"I don't want to keep her! Just... we need a different answer, okay?" He poked a finger up at where he assumed Barbie was, still covering his ear, which did nothing to help his peripheral vision. "Are you gonna behave?" She didn't bite him again, at least. "She can't stay here, right?"

"If she's torturing kids?" Nathan spelled out flatly. "No."

"So you gotta take her into custody."

"No box!" Barbie piped up.

" _Shh_!" Duke jerked his finger warningly. "You are _this_ close, I swear." He tentatively ventured to remove his hand from his ear to twist and see her better.

"She'd walk straight through the bars of the cells," Nathan said. "We could always get a hamster cage."

The miniature woman put her hands to her head and wailed. Duke made a grab for her and missed as she slid down his back. She fell off him somewhere around mid-thigh and made a pitiful noise as she hit the floor.

"Oh, fuck." Duke sort of caged his hands around her to stop her running off. "Shit. Are you all right?" The goddamn _teddy bear_ , he thought again. Real, red guts all over the place.

She kicked him, so he figured she was okay and breathed a sigh of relief. Nathan loomed over them, then wavered a moment in obvious indecision, then went over and rummaged among the toys in the corner and came back with a little pair of dungarees from an obviously bigger doll. He poked them into the cage of Duke's fingers. "Get dressed... Miss. You're being detained by the police. You need to come with us."

Duke stared at him.

"She's a little person," Nathan said defensively, standing up. "So I'm gonna... _what_?"

Duke shook his head. Muffled noises came from Barbie and he averted his head out of some weird sense of shame for the doll's modesty -- even though she'd been naked the whole time so far. He felt her hair brush his palm as she moved around, shuffling to pull the clothes on. "This is so fucking weird."

"Fake humans," muttered the Living Doll in retaliation.

She poked her head out of a gap between his fingers and he cautiously lifted his hands a few inches. She stood up, wavering on the pile of the rug she'd landed on, which was a lot more uneven for her feet than theirs.

"You going to come quietly?" Nathan asked. She nodded, and he cautiously reached down and picked her up. "Just remember to stay a toy while we're in front of anyone else," he murmured, a long-suffering note in his voice.

"Oh, no fair," Duke protested. "So she likes you now? Just watch out. Remember you can't feel it if she starts poking holes in you."

Mark Ripley met them outside the door and looked down dubiously at Barbie in Nathan's hand. "That's the one, you think?"

"We're pretty sure," Duke said.

The little girl leaned around her dad, one sticky hand reaching up "Lizzie!" she said insistently.

"Your doll's been bad," Duke said, informatively. "So the police need to take her away now."

Nathan _glared_ at him. "I'm really sorry," he said to the kid, shuffling his feet very uncomfortably. "But it's not safe to leave her around your brother, and I promise we'll look after her."

"Jem's _mean_ to my toys."

 _No kidding_ , thought Duke. 

"You might want to watch that, and protect them, given her... ability," Nathan warned Ripley.

"You don't think this might have left a _lasting impression_?" Duke demanded of him incredulously.

"We'll send someone who can talk to Jeremy," Nathan picked up. Remembering their responsibility of the other kind. Even if Jeremy was kind of a sex offender. Kind of. Accidentally. Maybe. Duke saw Barbie squirm a bit in Nathan's hand. He jostled the back of Nathan's arm, hard enough for it to move his balance and register, remembering something else. 

They -- _Nathan_ \-- really shouldn't be hanging around in this close proximity to Annie, given what they knew she could do.

"We need to _go_ ," Duke pressed.

***


	3. part 3

Downstairs, Audrey seemed to have gotten things calmed down. The mother now looked almost as sullen as Jeremy, and didn't react much to the doll in Nathan's hand or Audrey's question of, "Is that the... suspect?" Duke followed Nathan's lead and just nodded cagily.

"Okay," Audrey said, with a very particular inflection, and she smoothed her hands down her hips, mouth twisting, and looked back to Cerise. "I am going to need to talk to your little girl, if that's okay, but just... excuse me a moment, first."

They extricated themselves from the house and stood by the swing on the grass in Ripley's garden to evaluate the situation.

Nathan said, gruffly, "You can talk in front of Audrey," and opened his hand to let the doll crawl up his sleeve.

"No box?" she asked warily. "No gerbil cage?"

Audrey did a double-take despite herself. "Holy crap, this town gets weirder!"

"Weirder than us?" Duke asked.

"Okay, _nothing's_ weirder than you two. And that's even before the taxidermy," she returned with a fond, quick grin. "So, one dead teddy bear. Now a walking, talking, living doll."

"Mr. Fuzzles…?" Barbie gasped, a tiny hand rising to her mouth.

"I’m… really sorry," Audrey said, with visible effort. "There was an accident yesterday."

"He came back… _replaced_ ," the doll hissed back, with a level of horrified drama that had Duke struggling against an impulse to choke. Barbie’s gaze drifted regretfully back to the house. "Annie's back there. I… I..."

"You should've thought of that before you hurt her brother," Nathan said, pitilessly. It was completely _not fair_ that Barbie was nowhere near as hostile toward him as she still seemed toward Duke. So he'd... experimented... with dolls. They hadn't been _living dolls_ , they'd been plastic, plain and simple, and he wouldn't have done anything if they had been otherwise. The world was _not_ like the Toy Story movie.

"We arrested Barbie, then?" Audrey asked Nathan.

"...Maybe." He shuffled uncomfortably and massaged his forehead with his fingers. "I don't know what else to _do_ , Parker. She's... sentient. I don't know if she's dangerous away from the kid, he _did_ assault her, even if it's…" He winced. "I figure all we can do is... remove her from the home and... deal with the situation."

"I'm really hoping she wasn't strong enough to seriously _hurt_ Jeremy," Audrey said slowly. "The peg was the worst, but the spring wasn't as strong as it could have been, and I think there's a good chance no lasting harm was done." She sat down on the garden swing and kicked her heels. "We need to stop this Trouble at the source, though. I'll talk to... um, Annie." There was a recognisable moment where she floundered for the name. She looked worriedly at Duke and Nathan. "Are you both _sure_ that we want to try and talk down this Trouble so soon?"

"Duke--" Nathan said, a funny look on his face.

"Yeah," Duke said, his voice cracking. He _couldn't_. He -- the kid. It was a six year old _kid_. And he had to consider, above all, that Nathan _could not_ take the risk of a return to normality, with the injuries his body was now carrying. "Yes, Audrey, you should do that."

Nathan's hand caught his elbow, but just rested there. Duke wasn't sure if that emotion was pride or affection or missed opportunity.

"Okay," Audrey said quietly. "I'll try. This is _so_ much more knotty than the movies and children's books suggest it ought to be."

She got up and touched both their arms, briefly, pain in her face. Whatever Julia said and Nathan said, Duke suddenly realised, Audrey definitely thought one or both of them should go for this.

But then, she had been the one who'd put them in this position in the first place. Of course, she wanted to see it fixed, and herself absolved for choosing _for_ them.

"We'll go on ahead to the station," Nathan said. "Duke can take me to pick up the Bronco on the way."

"Is that really a good idea?" Duke eyed Barbie, who was relatively nervous and balanced with her feet in Nathan's jacket pocket at the moment, but that could change. "If she starts acting up again and you're behind the wheel..."

Nathan grunted noncommittally. His eyes kept returning to Duke, shifting and confused. He made what seemed like an effort to focus back upon Audrey before she turned away. "We'll go back to the station, either way. Try to figure... this... out."

She nodded. "I'll follow later." 

They watched her walk back across the grass, stepping over a bike and then a flower bed to Ripley's door.

"Why wouldn't you do it?" Nathan asked Duke. Some of the sentiment there was accusation. The unfairness of it made Duke feel like he couldn't win. "You could be normal again. Maybe."

"I _can't_ ," Duke emphasized, and really, he wasn't sure at this stage if he was capable of expanding it into more words than that. "I just _can't_ , okay? Julia said it. Hell, you said it. There are plenty of reasons. Besides, we don't know if it would work. Landon's Trouble and this one might not interact. It might even make things worse."

"Go with her," Nathan pushed, his eyes intent and more liquid than Duke could credit. "You can try."

"No!" Shit, it was hard enough to find the strength to make the decision _once_ , what the hell was Nathan trying to do to him? "Nathan, no! I'm staying like this and I'm staying with _you_!"

"We can still be together with you normal again," Nathan said. But he didn't know that; couldn't _know_ that. What if their shared condition was the biggest part of the pressures holding them together?

Besides, he just couldn't leave Nathan like this, alone. He couldn’t _be_ the coward who did that.

"No. Nathan, it's done. I told Audrey! Don't push this anymore." Before he'd really registered it, he was gripping Nathan by a desperate hold on the front of his clothes. He pulled him in and then leaned back again, rocking forward on his feet. He shook his head wordlessly.

Nathan's eyes widened in surprise. He put his hands on Duke's shoulders. They couldn't embrace -- the damn doll was in the way, and for all Duke knew they might asphyxiate her. But Nathan leaned in and kissed Duke, just a peck at first, then a deeper kiss as the reassurances of the gesture brought at least some measure of calm between them. "I don't understand it," Nathan said, between kisses, "but okay. I won't mention it again. Duke, it's all right." He slid his hands behind Duke's head and kissed him deeper still. In the middle of it, Duke distinctly registered Barbie saying, "Ew."

"Goddamn homophobic doll," Duke said, heaving a shaky breath as Nathan finally pulled back from him. "I hope we can find some solution that doesn't involve taking her home with us, because that is just going to kill our sex life."

***

Duke was a little unsettled by how soon Audrey joined them at the station, and he was suspicious of her reaction when he pressed her on the matter. " _Yes_ , I talked to her, Duke," she said, exuding exasperation. "Hopefully we won't have another problem. The family have got my number if anything does come up. Just _leave it_ , okay?"

"There's a psychiatrist we use sometimes going out to talk to Jeremy." Nathan looked at his watch. "She's probably there by now. We didn't manage to head off social services, so the family will be juggling that for a while. Turns out there's already an issue flagged up for the daughter from four years ago, which didn't help in trying to get this shut down."

So that was what Nathan had been talking so animatedly about with Garland, when he'd stepped out of the office and left Duke to score graffiti into his desk for twenty minutes.

"Her Trouble?" Audrey asked, then frowned. Four years was a long while back for Troubles. Nathan's had been one of the first Duke knew of to come back, this time around, dovetailing into his return to town because it was around the time they _might_ , and that was just less than three years.

"No." Nathan grimaced. "Ripley's second wife was an addict. She'd been clean while she met and wed and had a kid with him, but after the baby was born she started falling back on old ways. Some of them over the line into criminal, by the sound of it. Ripley tried to stand by her for a year and a half before he took the kids and left before child services took the kids from both of them."

Duke winced. So much for other people’s perfect childhoods.

"Well..." Audrey pulled a face. "At least Cerise seems... dedicated. What a _mess_. I hope they're not going to get into more trouble over this. We _know_ they didn't hurt their son, we should be able to do something."

"You wrote Duke plus Nathan in a little heart on my desk?"

Audrey stopped and blinked at Nathan's annoyed declaration while Duke decided to look elsewhere innocently. When Nathan pinned his eyes, he offered his best winning smile and bedroom eyes.

"This is _scored in_ ," Nathan snapped, discovering as much after licking his fingers and rubbing them over the marks, then angling his head and the desk lamp when they didn't come out. "You _idiot_..."

"Whoa! Cool it." Audrey stepped between them. "Boys. Focus."

Nathan sighed and settled back in his chair, though his eyes still glowered. "Do we know what set off the kid's Trouble?" he asked tightly.

Audrey sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "I didn't know the full implications when he told me. Ripley said that Annie's mom showed up in Haven again a few days ago. The family ran into her in town -- apparently there's an injunction against her coming near the little girl. Ripley said he hustled her away from them pretty fast and Cerise grabbed the kids and took them home, but it seems that was enough."

"Alexandra... Sandy Attby," Nathan said, attention split between eying a scrap of paper and scribbling his pen repeatedly over Duke's carving on the surface of his desk, though with the indentations Duke had made in the wood he wasn't going to be able to erase it like that easily, and Duke was vaguely offended by him trying. Though he also allowed that he'd known Nathan _would_ be furious and _would_ try. "It would be better to resolve that situation. If she's looking for the kid, another meeting could set Annie's Trouble off again."

Audrey nodded. "With the injunction, we do have some legal recourses there." She looked around as if she'd just realised the obvious omission. "Where's... Barbie?"

Nathan pointed wordlessly, and Duke said, "She's asleep. Seemed pretty tired. Just climbed up there and flaked out."

" _Was_ up all night torturing kids, after all," Nathan added, as Audrey cautiously ventured closer to Nathan's jacket, bundled up on the top of a shelf, and the little blonde head and pink arm that were visible amid the folds of it.

"Maybe you should stop by the toy store," Audrey said, her eyes narrowing with meaning, "and see if you can get her some _clothes_. This is a... well, it's a sentient person now, sort of. Leaving her like that is kind of graceless. The dungarees don't fit."

Duke and Nathan swapped glances and opted not to admit how much a step up that was from how they had first found her. "We're really going this route?" Nathan asked. "'Sentient person'? She's nine inches high and her skin's made of plastic. We _can't_ get her any legal standing."

"Stuffed," Duke pointed out glumly. "Technically dead. Technically, _we_ shouldn't have legal standing."

"Yeah, but _we_ can fake it," Nathan rolled his head. "What are we going to do with her? Annie's Trouble's quiescent now and she hasn't reverted to a toy." He sounded like that was the outcome he'd been _hoping_ for, but Duke didn't need to duck his head closer to check Barbie was sound asleep and oblivious to him -- they could all hear the little snores.

"We can't just find her a home with another kid, one who doesn't have brothers," Audrey said. "Even if we could trust her in that environment, it's pretty obvious that a _living toy_ is too vulnerable to place in the power of a child who is bigger, stronger, and let's face it, probably going to act like a total asshole at least _sometimes_." She frowned. "Maybe I should take her with me. In the circumstances, handing her off to two men doesn't seem appropriate, either."

Nathan grunted, "Be my guest." Duke breathed something of a sigh of relief that they _wouldn't_ have to take the psychotic doll home tonight.

Audrey tipped her head. "Well, right now I am going to try and find out where Garland and the guys are on the other case."

"I'll try and trace Sandy Attby," Nathan countered. "Sounds like we got pretext to at least have a word with her." He looked at Duke as Audrey slipped quietly out of the door. "Are you planning to hang around in my office all afternoon?"

"Pretty much." Duke frowned at the clock with a sinking feeling, because it wasn't even lunchtime yet and it didn't exactly look like there was anything here for him to do.

Nathan tapped his pen and raised his eyebrows, and just _looked_ , for about an ice age, putting Duke into that position where he felt like he was going to have to reply to frigging _silence_. Except Nathan did eventually get there first, and say, with a firm emphasis on each word, " _I'm_. _Fine_."

"It's not that I--" Duke started to protest.

"You can go to the _Gull_." Now Nathan got verbal. "You can _leave me_. I know you... care, but I have to do my job. I can't do it if you're around me every second of the day, because you're _not a cop_."

"Yeah." Duke swallowed. He knew that, he _did_. "I guess it's really not like it's going to be dangerous, tracing this Attby woman."

"It's paperwork and phone calls. But I'll need to do 'dangerous' sometimes, too, Duke."

"But not today," Duke said quickly, because _today_ was still far too close to _yesterday_ , and yesterday still made Duke shudder.

"No," Nathan huffed. "Not today. Go back to work, Duke. You can swing around later and take me to pick up my car."

"Yeah, I'll do that." Duke stood up. He'd be counting the hours, though.

"You can phone me," Nathan said, causing relief to wash through him, until Nathan finished, " _Twice_ ," and Duke blinked. Nathan clarified, "At half past two, and before you come to pick me up, just to check I won't need to work late."

"Okay." Duke shook himself. "I'll be in touch, then." He paused and turned before the door. "Hey, do I get a--" He pointed at his lips.

Nathan glowered, but then relented his efforts to lay down his personal barriers and stood up, walking around the desk. He put his hands on Duke's hips and let Duke be the one to lean in to kiss him.

"I'm sorry if I'm _freaking out_ ," Duke said, a little bitterly, as he pulled back, an inch from Nathan's lips. "But you nearly died for good yesterday, and you did not have to _see_ yourself in that state. I just want to be sure you're safe."

Nathan gave a soft snort of air through his nose, close enough that Duke felt it on his skin. "Audrey will look after me," he said with a generous degree of soft irony. "Doesn't she always?"

A pat of a hand on his arm and Nathan's wry smile, and Duke made himself walk out of the door and out of the police station.

Trying to focus on serving drinks through the afternoon was just as lousy as he'd have predicted. He wanted to phone Nathan and check up, but every time he looked at the clock it seemed to have been about five minutes since the last, and two-thirty was an endless eternity away.

He shouldn't be this desperate, this reliant, Duke thought, as he gripped the wood of the counter between his fingers, so hard he was even hurting himself. He _shouldn't_. It was wrong and pathetic and yet -- and yet--

His sanity depended on Nathan sticking around. He couldn't _contemplate_ carrying on, if what had nearly happened yesterday... He felt precarious enough still with the results of that event, with the permanent marks and reminders writ upon Nathan's body that he'd been left to cope with.

He needed to get a hold of himself.

Instead, he poured a generous shot from one of his better whiskeys and knocked it back, trying his best to pick a moment when his staff and his customers wouldn't see.

***

They _didn't_ get a reprieve from the presence of Barbie that evening, because the doll threw a fit when it was suggested she go home with Audrey. No, she'd latched onto _Nathan_ , who honestly could barely give the smallest shit about her, and that only out of duty and humanitarianism, if that was the word, after she'd stuck pins in a thirteen year old kid.

Nathan had apparently taken on Audrey's urging and paid a visit to the toy store on Main Street at lunchtime. As a result, Barbie was now wearing a pink dress that fit and little shoes and underwear. She'd also acquired a small comb -- still bigger than her arms -- and kept returning to trying to brush her hair into shape. It was clear that Annie had carried her around by the hair for most of the past two years because it largely stuck up in an untrainable messy thatch. Duke put a tub full of warm water and a dab of dish soap on a plate onto the table with her so she could attempt to get the sticky bits out while he was cooking dinner for himself and Nathan.

Nathan had come back via his own house once he'd got the Bronco, and brought with him a rag-basket and sewing kit that made Duke gawp.

"We _can't_ keep her," Duke pointed out as Nathan sat at the table hemming edges for small blankets and a little coat. "Look. It's doing terrible things to our masculinity already. I still can't believe you have a sewing kit, man. Audrey told me about the decoupage, but--"

Nathan glared at him. "I'm not-- _we're_ not keeping her! But there are things she needs, it's not like-- Audrey told you about the decoupage?" He looked betrayed.

"How can it possibly be a good idea for you to sew? You probably stab yourself a hundred times and don't realise it."

"I _quilt_." Nathan's eyes burned like coals; Duke would swear they glinted from the shadows as they got narrower. "It's _good for_ my affliction. I need to practice with things that demand delicate muscle control, okay? You don't complain about the results of that practice." He proceeded to cut up one of Duke's clean tea towels and start hemming the edge for when Barbie had finished dunking her hair.

"Couldn't you have used an older one?" Duke griped. "I just got everything matching--"

He stopped as Nathan's eyebrows climbed his forehead, where they perched at a lofty altitude, judging him. Yeah, okay, this was doing terrible things to both their masculinity.

Barbie splashed and they transferred their attentions to the doll's antics as she pulled her head out of the tub. Nathan dropped the towel fragment next to her, though not quite in time to stop her shaking her head like a dog and sending a small shower of water droplets over the kitchen.

Duke swore and then determinedly went back to cooking. Nathan, somewhat to his relief, decided enough was enough and put the sewing kit aside. "You feeling better?" Duke heard him pensively ask the doll.

"I don't know." She answered the question with more seriousness than Duke was expecting, wrapping her hair in the towel and sitting down on top of an upside-down eggcup. "If I can't go back to Annie, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know what I'm _for_. I never felt any of these things before! They're too big and difficult! Why couldn't I just stay happy and quiet and live with my family?"

"Annie's Trouble makes things real if she treats them like they're real," Nathan said. "Until a few days ago, you couldn't experience any of this." He pressed his lips together in a thin line and ran his knuckles over his mouth thoughtfully. "We're... a kind of opposite thing happened to us, but we still think and feel like we're human."

Barbie sniffed. "I know about the Troubles." She pulled her tiny face into a frown. "I know about my family, and the leg Jem broke last year that took four months to properly mend, and Annie's mother and Cerise's job and -- _none_ of these things are from the past few days. I must have always been real. It makes no sense otherwise."

Duke craned his head back to catch Nathan's eye, because seriously? The doll could think and feel and rationalize and experience trauma, and seemed to have been brought fully into existence _intact_ with a complete view of the world. There was something horribly, horribly creepy about that. Worse when he thought back to the teddy bear, which was a death that had pretty much happened right in front of him and it was getting harder and harder to write that incident off as excess weirdness that didn't matter.

"It sounds like you got the sort of background information Annie would assume an adult person would have," Nathan said cautiously.

"Up to and including things Annie probably doesn't understand herself," Duke pitched in. "Which is odd, when you think about it."

"Barbie's a... role model." Nathan choked a bit and pulled a face. "Of sorts. For a _pre-teen girl_ , damn it... shut up, Duke. It makes sense Annie would assume she'd know more about the world than Annie knows herself."

Duke snerked at Nathan's frustration.

The doll with the existential crisis got up and climbed over the side of the water-filled tub, splashing her feet, little hands picking up her dress. She looked up and announced, "I want a curtain."

Nathan looked around a bit helplessly.

Duke sighed and picked up tub and doll and carried them to a corner of the counter under one of the embedded spotlights, put it down, and propped a tray up in front. "Okay?"

There was a short pause before Barbie said, "Thank you," but he supposed that was a sort of thaw.

At least that enabled them to pretend the doll wasn't there for a while. Duke went over to Nathan and kissed him in their new relative privacy, and picked up his hands to examine them for needle-stabs. Nathan didn't immediately notice, but when he did, he pulled his hands away irritably. "Don't mother me."

Duke hadn't really expected to get away with that one. He slid his hands downward and slipped them in Nathan's back pockets. "We are not going to be able to have sex tonight with her around," he pointed out. She couldn't be trusted. They could hardly leave her _alone_. She was going to have to sleep in the room with them. They would have to lock the bedroom door, and if he woke up tied down, with anything attached to any part of his anatomy, he was going to be pissed.

"It's okay," Nathan said. "We'll work out some other solution tomorrow."

They made the most of the next ten minutes while Barbie was occupied and hidden away, until Duke was forced to break off, half-hard from heavy petting, to deal with their crisping meal.

"Do you eat?" he asked Barbie as she peered at them around the side of the tray, blonde head fluffy. Duke eyed her warily as she started to climb down the counter, still thinking of teddy bear guts all over the parking lot.

"Don't know," she responded. "Never tried."

Duke dished some of the meal into a small saucer while she scaled the back of a chair and attained the lofty heights of the table again. Nathan was sitting back with his legs sprawled wide, drinking a beer. He reached out to offer a finger to help Barbie bridge the final large gap between the chair and the table top.

"Teddy bear could drink," Duke said, putting plates down in front of his two charges before going back for his own. "I figure we're good to try."

The way the doll fell on the food suggested she only hadn't realised that she _needed to_. Something about that thought upset Duke, or upset him _more_ , because everything about the doll pretty much upset him. So she'd been brought to life in oblivious hands, mistreated, sexually assaulted, and had been slowly starving the whole time? He added some water in a sherry glass next to the saucer.

Audrey said she'd sorted out Annie's Trouble, in which case there hopefully shouldn't be any more toys exposed to the same threats, but if there were others that might have already turned into living things, he should probably mention the risk to Audrey and have them go over to the family home again to double check and be _sure_.

It made sense that Barbie should need to eat, if her insides had been transformed like the bear's had. They were real on the inside, with functioning bodies. Their surface only still _looked_ like toys.

A shudder ran through Duke. He couldn't help returning to the thought -- because it wasn't as if he hadn't thought about it before, just his brain had gotten really good at going "LA LA LA not listening!" -- that he and Nathan probably _didn't_ need to eat. Their capacity to eat was just another part of their living illusion. Those first few days, he had been aware of not feeling hungry, and that he'd kept up cooking and eating at certain times had been more out of habit and determination to be human than anything else.

He had a suspicion Nathan skipped meals during the day when he wasn't around, or the occasional times Nathan needed a break and went home instead of back to the _Cape Rouge_ with Duke. It was something they didn't talk about.

He was _not_ giving up food, damn it, and Nathan, when he was around him at least, wasn't going to be allowed to drop that aspect of their humanity either.

He watched Nathan eat slowly, curling each morsel carefully around the fork, seeming to savour the flavours. Maybe he was worrying for nothing. But Nathan, with that hole in his middle, with his tendencies not to take care of himself, with the added dissociation from life of his own Trouble... It seemed to Duke that he’d already started down the path of leaving Human behind.

 _Not going to let that happen_ , Duke thought. When he looked at it like that, maybe it was his duty to stick close to Nathan, to do everything in his power to keep him grounded within the world, sex included. _Sex_ , he concluded, was probably the best remedy.

"What are you thinking about?" Nathan eyed him from across the table. 

It struck Duke that he had himself been eating methodically and staring ahead of him for an undefined duration, and damn it, that wasn't the way, either.

"Being human," Duke bit off succinctly, taking another mouthful and making every effort to taste it.

Nathan took that at face value and didn't say anything.

Barbie gave a satisfied little moan and stretched out on the table in the little blankets Nathan had made, cuddling them around her. There was a certain pinched look to her face and Duke sincerely hoped she wasn't going to throw up. She'd eaten everything he'd put down, and in retrospect, the small plate had been rather large for her if she wasn't used to eating. But seconds ticked past and her face relaxed, and it looked like she was just going to sleep it off.

"So..." Duke turned back to Nathan, who looked up from a similar long study of the living doll. "Quilting. Am I ever going to see any of your traditional crafts on the _Rouge_? Cover for one of the couches, perhaps? Bedspread?"

Nathan glared at him and said, "We'd destroy it in a week."

***

They probably could've had sex, if they'd been quiet about it, because Barbie was out like a light. Nathan had transferred her from the table to an open drawer at the top of the cabinet in the bedroom. But with her there it felt way too weird to try. Children's toys should be essentially _innocent_ , Duke couldn't help but feel, and besides, there was the traumatic experience she'd already had at Jeremy's hands. So they limited themselves to kissing and petting, and even that they did under the covers, which imposed certain unfortunate limits for Nathan. After a while, they just gave in to sleep, Nathan succumbing first, lying on his front with one arm flung over Duke's chest. Duke lay with his eyes open staring out of the skylight at the stars for a stretch longer. Thinking about the responsibilities of having appointed himself the guardian of his and Nathan's humanity.

Morning seemed to happen between one breath and the next. Sleep was dreamless, and had been for a while -- which was _unexpected_ , considering the amount of concerns that plagued his conscious mind, and Duke was starting to worry that 'while' corresponded to the time they'd been like this. And what did that _mean_? What essential part of him did that indicate was missing, if he could no longer _dream_?

He needed to ask Nathan, sometime, if Nathan dreamed still, but hadn't yet plucked up the courage to face a negative reply.

Barbie was somehow into Duke's sock drawer, and had found the other things stored in there, which for some reason made him blush furiously and lose his temper. He _knew_ she wasn't innocent, and that she was a child's toy but not a child, and the whole thing was ridiculous and totally fucking irrational, but somehow he couldn't help it.

At least Nathan seemed back to his usual self, corset extra, rattling around the boat with early morning impatience to get going and do all the exciting things he did at work all day. Or maybe it was Duke's perspective, that he seemed a lot less fragile, less vulnerable and under threat than the day before. Or a combination of both.

As soon as he had those thoughts, Duke instantly started worrying about whether they should have bounced back so soon, or if the fact they had was just another erosion of something essential inside them. Really, he just couldn't win.

He mentioned over breakfast his concerns about what might happen if any other living toys were still left over from the activation of Annie's Trouble, and Nathan's reaction reflected his own unease. "I'll stop by today. Better sooner than later, considering the food and drink aspect," he said. He frowned at Barbie. "Maybe you'd better come with me, after all. Any other living toys might not talk to me."

They'd already debated that point and Barbie had reluctantly been persuaded to stay with Duke so that Nathan could do his job without carrying a doll around. Which _had_ meant that Duke had been expected to do his job while carrying a doll around. Better a bartender than a detective, he supposed. Duke stretched his mouth into a long smirk for Nathan's benefit. "All yours."

Nathan rolled his eyes.

He said, "Do _try_ not to phone me every hour of the day today," as his parting shot as he left Duke to get on with his separate preparations to go in to the _Gull_. It was a fucking _relief_ , to be honest, not to have the doll around. The doll freaked him the fuck out and made him think of all sorts of things that were best avoided. He took his time getting ready and hoped Nathan would find a solution to the Barbie problem sometime today and offload the pint-sized plastic woman on someone else.

Twenty minutes on, his cellphone rang, and he answered it, noticing Audrey's name as he picked it up. "Is Nathan there?" she asked instantly, her voice a little sharp. "I realise he might be too _occupied_ to answer his phone but it's important, I just found out something--"

"Whoa! He already left," Duke headed her off, offended. "We're not having sex. Point of fact, we haven't _been_ having sex for over twenty four hours now. The Barbie doll's worse than a chastity belt." The implication of Audrey's accusation fully registered with him an instant later and fear slammed through him. "Wait. You lost him _again_?"

She snorted. "Duke, this overprotective paranoia of yours, you _really_ need to deal with it. He'll be driving. I'll tell him when he gets to the station. Go back to your breakfast." A trace of apology entered her voice, but Duke was still less interested in that than the fact of Nathan missing, and hell with the reassurances. He _had_ said he was stopping off at Ripley's, and even if Annie's Trouble was supposed to be quiescent now, he suddenly didn't like the risk of Nathan being around her. Duke wasn't exactly convinced Audrey had put her heart and soul into laying that Trouble to rest.

Since it seemed clear Audrey already thought he was losing his mind, he tried to keep his voice level as he said, "He was stopping off at the Ripley house to check on the other toys because we found out some things about Barbie that disturbed us, like the whole need to eat and drink thing... Look, I'm gonna head up there myself and make sure--"

"Ripley's--" Audrey's voice was very sharp. " _Duke_. Ripley's ex-wife... second ex-wife... is the girlfriend of Graham Sand. That's what I wanted to tell Nathan. They're in town after the _kid_."

"Annie," Duke said automatically. He pressed his hand over his lips and panicked a moment, then half-assedly realised he had to take his hand away to communicate with Audrey. " _Nathan_. Oh my God."

"Duke--" She spoke with exasperation, but tension too. "I'll go check it out. None of this means he has to be in danger."

"I am _definitely_ going up there." Duke was in a state of undress, with his pants clinging around his waist and his feet and chest bare, hair straggly and wet from the shower. He grabbed for his closest hidden firearm, and barely remembered to thrust his feet into a pair of boots and grab a shirt too as he charged off the boat, still dumbly clutching the cellphone to his ear.

Audrey was yelling. "Duke, do not do anything! Wait until I get there! Duke!"

He cut the call and put the phone away. Somehow he was already running for his truck, unlaced boots slopping on his sockless feet. He prayed that Nathan was just talking to the family and had decided not to answer his phone. Last time they'd crossed paths, these guys had almost gutted him. If it happened again... there was surely no hope they wouldn't finish the job.

The journey seemed to go past in the blink of an eye. He might have broken some laws on the way, but boo hoo. Nathan's Bronco was parked sedately on the road outside the Ripley house, and there was not a hope that Duke was waiting until Audrey got there.

Another shriek of brakes behind him as he left his truck indicated there was no need to wait anyway, so... no problem. He still heard Audrey yelling his name frantically behind him. He was pretty sure he was set to beat her to the door and pretty sure he didn't _care_. The gun he'd snatched up back at the _Cape Rouge_ was openly in his hand, but he wasn’t much thinking about the explanations he’d have to make if this panic was all for nothing.

The door opened before he could connect with his fist to hammer on it.

Then Duke's face was full of gun, and of Nathan with a gun to his head.

Nathan looked pissed and tense, white marks around the skin of his clenched jaw. The bottom of his shirt had been pulled out and was rucked up. One of the unpleasant men from the mugshots held the gun in a bandaged hand, but didn't seem any less tense and unhappy with the situation than Nathan did. Duke wondered if he was the one who had planned this morning raid. In the background, Duke was vaguely aware he could hear Ripley's voice yelling, and Annie screaming and _screaming_ , and he caught a glimpse of Cerise, pale, silent and narrow-eyed, clutching Jeremy to her side.

"Don't do anything rash." Audrey's voice broke through the red haze. Talking to Mugshot, but maybe she was also talking to Duke. Her voice was like crystal against the rest of the world, sharp and clear. "He's a police officer, Mr White. Let's just take a breath and think about the extra time pulling that trigger could rack up."

"Fucking _freak_ police officer," White choked. "He's got -- like Frankenstein stitches -- it's -- that's not _human_."

"I told you, they're all fucking freaks in this town!" A woman's voice, unfamiliar and unpleasant, about as collected and calm as White was. "Mark's _family_... He let me marry a fucking freak family and never told me!"

"Let's just calm down," Audrey said, sounding like she was making an extreme effort to sustain the calm to say it. Her firearm was steady enough in her hands.

"Annie is Troubled," Cerise said. _Her_ voice was a flat simmer. She sounded like a frickin' Vulcan. "I can look after her for you. Please, Alexandra."

"Shut up, bitch!"

"Shh, Sandy, shh." Another unfamiliar man's voice. The little girl was screaming again.

Duke took a step back from the door. White was jerking his head at him and shooting panicked looks at Nathan, who wasn't doing anything but standing there with his hands up and his shirt rumpled and a slice of bare stomach and stitched scar on display.

"We're going!" White spat the words, yelling them past Duke to Audrey. "You let us go, we don't shoot the fucked-up cop and see if you can stitch up his _head_ this time! We're here for Sandy's kid. That's all we want. It's _her kid_. Jesus Christ, a mother deserves that!"

Duke felt like a spare part: a frozen, useless spare part, unable to react -- to contemplate _acting_ \-- while Nathan was under threat.

"Sandy can't look after Annie," Audrey said. "What happens next time she gets high, next time she gets drunk?"

"It's _her kid_!" White yelled back.

"Sandy broke three of Annie's bones when she was only two years old, Griff. Be reasonable. You don't _want_ to have to look after a kid on the run, anyhow, do you?"

"It's _her kid_ and she's _Graham's girl_!" White yelled stubbornly. "He's the best thing I got to a brother, and we're going! They're my family, and if you get in the way I'm gonna shoot the freak cop!"

"White," Nathan started.

"Shut up!" White slammed the gun into his earlobe. He half turned his head, then whipped it back around on Nathan... Duke... Audrey. He didn't have enough attention for everyone, but he was _far_ too rattled to risk making any move, a hair away from pulling the trigger out of sheer tension. "Come away, guys. Sandy, get the kid out to the car. They won't do anything."

The woman came into view, trying to drag Annie. She was kicking and screaming. _Screaming_ in a manner that did awful things to the pit of Duke’s stomach. He had never seen a kid so violently terrified. Mothers... he thought sickly. No happy family histories here.

"Jesus!" The other guy -- Graham Faud, Duke remembered -- was panicking, even more stressed than his partner. "Honey... Sandy, honey, give me the kid." But Annie made almost as much noise about that prospect.

"It's not going to work, White." Audrey kept her commentary directed to the man least emotionally invested. "You must be able to see that it's not going to work."

White's face twitched, then stiffened in determination. "Give the kid to the freak cop," he said. "You--" He jabbed the gun at Nathan. "Pick up the kid."

" _No_!" Duke yelled, and got the gun swung full on him... just _great_. On the other hand, gunshot wounds would probably make far less a mess of them than the knife would again, at least if White stuck to pointing it at chest level. Maybe he'd survive it just fine, like this.

If he really wanted to survive like that.

Nathan's eyes were more panicked now than they had been when the gun was aimed at _him_.

"White, don't. Leave him alone. I'm gonna get the kid for you." He turned around and held out his arms. "Annie, I'll keep you safe, can you come on over to me?" She lunged across the gap between them when her mother let her go, flinging herself into his arms. Nathan adjusted his grip and straightened up, holding her close, rocking her slightly as she sobbed into his shoulder. "It's all right," he breathed in her ear, sliding a hand over her back. "It'll be all right."

Duke's heart just about broke, watching them.

Sandy made a sound of rage that choked off into a sob of her own. "She's my daughter. How come she'd go like that to a freak she hardly even knows? It's not fair..."

"You're not gonna shoot him while he's holding the kid," Duke told White positively. But the gun was still pointing at him and not Nathan now, and he didn't have the confidence to make that move, even if he _couldn't_ see the tattoo on the arms of anyone present.

"I can still shoot him in the head, just as planned," White snapped. "My aim's not that bad." He kept the gun on Duke anyway. He waved it and moved, backing them both out of the door onto the lawn.

"Nathan, you need to put the kid down," Duke said. Holding Annie wasn't going to stop them shooting him, the trauma to the little girl of getting bits of Nathan spattered all over her was apparently no consideration for anyone present, including the mother. "Her Trouble could kill you."

"Duke," Nathan berated, holding the girl.

"Nathan, if you're holding her, they have to take you _with them_ ," Duke pointed out, panic barely held back.

Nathan's eyes said, _Good_ , and, _I'm not leaving her_.

Sandy and Faud were stumbling out of the door, hand in hand, Faud's free hand on another gun. Ripley followed them, dragging at Sandy's arm and openly begging her for his daughter. Cerise had confined herself to staying exactly where she was and keeping tight hold of her son, and she remained there and let the door shut on them. That left them grouped on the lawn, Audrey back at the picket fence covering the scene grim-faced. At least Cerise had a chance to get Jeremy out of danger and call backup.

"Don't even fucking think about it," Faud said to Audrey. He pointed the weapon in his hand at her. Nobody was bothering to cover Nathan. Then again, there wasn't a lot Nathan could do with his arms full of the kid.

Then Duke saw the blood. A bright red smear over Nathan's belly where the stitches had been. It was a small patch at first sight, but he'd swear it was growing fast.

"Audrey, Audrey, _Audrey_ ," Duke stammered. "Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance _now_!"

"Fuck!"

"No, _Jesus_ , will you shut up!"

Two guns on them, held by complete wackos, but there was a limit to how much Duke could bring himself to care. Nathan was bleeding out. Duke had seen the wound, knew it intimately, knew how _big_ it was, had slim hopes of Nathan's chances of surviving it as flesh-and-blood, and _all_ those chances depended on him being able to get medical attention _fast_.

"Audrey, do it!" Duke yelled. "Look at his stomach!" He took two steps to his right and put himself between their line of sight and Audrey.

"Duke, _don't_ ," Nathan said again, tightly.

"You're bleeding."

"I know. I can't feel it. I can hang on. Duke, it's _stitched_."

"How many times do I have to tell you that not feeling it won't -- it _doesn't work like that_!" Duke raged, his vision blurring with moisture, and almost got shot as the eyes of both gun-toting maniacs flew wide at his outburst and their itchy fingers twitched. It didn't register with the sort of panic it ought. He just whipped his head around to Audrey, checking, and she was backing off with her phone out. When she specified 'Ambulance', she _yelled_ it, to be sure the gun-toting dicks heard. "She's calling an ambulance, okay?" Duke pushed desperately. "He can't go with you. He can't hold the kid. Look at him. Look at his stomach. Look at the blood on her clothes. You _did_ that, you bastards, can't you see?"

White was looking, and shaking. "That's not possible. I know what I saw before--"

"Was that possible either?" Nathan's words were laconic, but his face had gone visibly paler and his limbs were developing a tremble; he was wavering on his feet. Despite everything, his eyes flashed in odd inspiration. "You cut me open. Doctors spent hours sewing it back up."

What? The _last_ thing of any consequence to Duke in this situation was hiding the Troubles.

"Screw that!" White yelled. "I know what I saw. He ain't human. This is a trick!"

" _Nathan_!" Audrey yelled, off the phone, as Nathan swayed on his feet.

"I need to put you down," Nathan said gently to the kid, but there was strain -- fear -- under his voice. "I don't want to drop you."

"What's wrong?" Annie's panicked little voice was wrenching. "I don't want to go back with them!"

"Swap," Duke said desperately. "Swap! I'll go with you, Nathan waits here for the ambulance." He looked at White and Faud. "I'll hold the kid. Please, let him stay here."

"Duke," Audrey berated with an edge of anger, but Faud nodded tersely and they were already making the switch. Duke grabbed the kid, folding his arms around Nathan too in the process, taking Annie straight from him so that Nathan didn't have to bend.

"It's okay..." Duke started, ostensibly to the kid, but probably just as much to Nathan, since they were locked close together with Annie between them.

"This is Duke," Nathan said, his voice very low, very breathy, and he was _definitely_ speaking to the kid, his lips pressed close to her ear... Using the last of his energy, by the sound of it... And his knees were buckling. "He needs to be real, too. Please, Annie. Please..." And Nathan was on the fucking _ground_ , half lying on Duke's feet, and Duke had his arms full of frightened, clutching child and two guns pointing at his head and _nothing_ he could do.

"Let's go," Duke said, desperately realising they needed to get _moving_ , because these guys needed to be out of here before the ambulance arrived if Nathan was to stand a chance.

Audrey's gun was wavering, her movements a stutter of false starts and aborted steps, clearly wanting to go to Nathan, clearly not daring to push the situation any more than Duke already had. "The kid, Duke," she said, falteringly.

"They're not going to _hurt her_ ," Duke said, playing to the rest of his audience for all he was worth. "She's Sandy's daughter."

"That's right," the woman said, sounding like she'd been thrown a rope, sobbing now with open relief... and Duke didn't trust it for a moment. Oh, she'd mean it _now_... "He's right. She's my baby. She should be with her _momma_."

"No, don't let her _take her_!" Ripley begged desperately, and Annie _shrieked_ into Duke's shoulder and clutched him harder.

"We need to go," White said. He waved the gun around pretty much everybody -- including, for a moment, his allies -- and took stumbling sideway steps toward the road, waving Duke on with him. Duke staggered a few steps in his wake. Annie was starting to struggle, affecting his balance. Didn't help that his eyes were still mostly glued on Nathan on the ground. Nathan was still conscious, front-down but face tipped to the side, blinking and dazed. Duke couldn't be sure how much blood was seeping out of him because it was being absorbed by the grass and dirt, but from the state of his shirt, Duke feared it was a lot. Those stitches... he might have been sewn up, but not the way you'd sew up a _living person_ , and his skin would be different now, alive again, less rigid from whatever freakin' disgusting curing process Landon had done.

"Nathan!" he called back, thinking that lying like that was just tipping all his life straight out of him into the lawn. "Nathan, _roll over_. For f-- goodness sake. On your back, buddy! Try to put a hand over that cut!" For all he knew, doing that would be as much good as putting a sticking plaster on it. They had _no idea_ what the interactions of Annie's Trouble and Landon's meant for the state of Nathan's insides, and Nathan's life.

He craned his head back a few times to see Nathan try. Sandy and Faud were close up behind Duke, shoving at him. Faud had his gun on him, White's was covering Audrey.

Something small and pink flung itself across Faud's head, hanging down his face and clawing at his eyes. "She's my kid, too!" the tiny female voice of the plastic woman shrieked.

 _What the fuck even -- Barbie?!_ thought Duke wildly. In all of the other fucked-up-ness of events he had forgotten about the doll.

But at least he'd _known_ about the doll, unlike Sandy, who was screaming now, and Faud and White, whose gun hands drifted -- Duke wasn't going to waste the opportunity of their distraction. He swung Annie around and down to his left side, and kept moving, letting his right shoulder hit Faud in the gut in the same lunging motion, then dragged the gun down with his now-freed left hand, and came all the way around to slug Faud in the face with his right. Barbie had fallen somewhere, and he had too many other things on his mind to worry about her, though he did pay attention to where his feet were stepping, because the thought of crushing her-- He heard a shot fire, and fear sliced through him, but it was White who was falling, struck by Audrey. An ambulance siren became audible in the distance.

Sandy lunged at Duke's arm, picking Faud over her daughter, who was running away, back into Ripley's arms, and then Ripley was running with her back into the house. Duke wasn't above slugging Sandy in the face almost as hard as he had Faud. The sirens were coming closer.

"No, no, _no_ , Nathan, no! Hang on!" Audrey ran to Nathan, not quite ignoring White -- she still had her gun out and vaguely aimed in his direction, and she kicked his out of reach on the way. "It is _not_ acceptable to die just when you've got your life back! I'm not going to let you, do you hear me? Damn it, Nathan..." She pulled Nathan completely onto his back, one-handed, the other clamped over the wound. Duke saw her give in and put her gun aside to press both hands over the wound.

...Registered that would probably be because _he_ had Faud's gun in his own hand now.

"You _fuckers_ ," Duke said, pointing it, with a quick double take that established both kids were still safely inside the house.

Sandy gasped and skittered back from another attempt to claw him.

But Duke wasn't planning on shooting anything today. The ambulance swung around onto the street, and then in the blink of an eye it was pulling up, and all he could think about was _Nathan_ , who looked unconscious or dead beneath Audrey's hands.

***

Duke waited in the hospital. While Nathan was in the operating room, Duke's heart strained in its beating as if it beat for _both_ of them, beat to keep Nathan alive. Duke's chest felt heavy and his gut ached. 

They brought Nathan out of the operating room alive. Things had been touch-and-go, and Nathan still wasn’t out of the woods yet, the surgeon said. 

Julia and Audrey hovered, seeming as concerned about Duke as they were Nathan. Duke sat and held Nathan's pale hand between both his hands and waited. Bathroom breaks and candy bars and coffee from the vending machine were accomplished on autopilot, and usually someone else’s suggestion.

Garland hung close, his presence like a ghost, pale and tight-lipped and _scary_ , drifting in and out. A couple of times he spoke to Duke, curt commands like, "Gotta give you marks for dedication," or "I'm too old for this shit," but mostly he communicated in head-shakes and glowers, or didn't look at Duke at all.

Landon had called, hours ago. On Nathan’s cellphone first, which Duke didn't find and get to in time, and then on Duke's. " _I felt -- I felt something happen_ ," he'd said, breathlessly, over the line. " _I almost didn_ ' _t think you_ ' _d answer. What happened, Duke?_ "

Duke told him. They were still waiting to hear whether Nathan would pull through. 

Almost dully, it crossed his mind that it really would be pretty easy to hook up Landon and Ripley with the suggestion that they arrange some playdates for their children… Maybe they could manoeuvre another miracle into being.

 _Another miracle_ … But he was still waiting for Nathan's.

Duke had been there waiting for sixteen hours straight by the time Nathan slowly blinked his eyes open. 

Duke thought that Julia had dragged Audrey home to get some sleep, after Nathan had been declared past immediate danger, and the crotchety phantom of Garland was in one of his drifting out phases and had gone and lapsed comatose in his car outside in the parking lot, according to one of the nurses. As the guy said, he was too old for sixteen house vigils, for sure. 

Nathan licked his lips and moved them slowly, producing no sound at first while Duke made a show of kissing his fingers, because it probably _wasn't_ a good idea to fling himself on Nathan, and he could hold himself back, he _could_. "You're gonna be all right," he said. "They sewed up your patchwork insides as well as your outsides." Julia had said that the repair job Landon had done was probably enough to save Nathan's life until help could get there, holding everything in place with the stitches when his return to full life had instigated the comparative damage that would have been done if he was flesh and blood when he was stabbed. The big danger now was infection -- large gut wound and everything -- but Julia had also made the point that Nathan's medical history showed him being uncannily resistant to infection, and had pointed out the speed he'd recovered from a bullet in the shoulder only months before. Something to do with his Trouble, she'd suggested. "You're gonna be okay, Nate."

Nathan's lips finally shaped rough words. "Are you... real?"

"I--" It struck Duke in a flood that he _hadn't thought about it_. Audrey must have asked him a dozen times, he thought, his brain reeling, but he'd been far, far away on planet worry-about-Nathan and hadn't registered it. "I don't know." Did he feel different? All he'd felt for almost the last day was _numb_.

Nathan managed to roll his eyes. He brought Duke's hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to the back of it -- quite hard, actually. "I can't tell," he said, muffled. "I've never been able to tell."

"Well, at least not needing general anaesthetic ruled out one risk to your life in all of this," Duke said. He felt like he might keel over with relief, but--

What about Nathan's question? _Was_ he real? "I'm not cutting into myself to find out," he said. Maybe it was better he--

" _Duke_ ," Nathan said. "Are you _hungry_?"

"A little bit..." Vending machine chocolate and coffee for twenty four hours tended to leave a bit of a hollow space.

A number of things registered upon him, like how _exhausted_ he was, and how much he just wanted to be home in bed -- albeit with Nathan, who wasn't going to be at home in the bed with him because he'd be lucky if he got out of the hospital in a matter of _days_.

"You're real," Nathan declared, watching his face.

Duke touched his ear and found the spot where Barbie had bitten through. A scab crumbled and came off in his hand. He sat and stared at the crust of blood on his fingertips.

"I'm -- I'm--" He was suddenly, horribly _afraid_.

What Mortimer Kale had done had been undone. What _Landon_ had done had been undone. Somehow, against all the odds, they had survived the transition back to being themselves; whole, real, alive again, though it would take time for Nathan to make a full recovery even if his Trouble _did_ give him an edge. No longer freaks, no longer dead, no longer reanimated and _horrifying_ to every part of Duke when he actually thought about it. They were... normal... again.

But what had their joint unreality done? It had brought them together. Brought Nathan back to him, _impossibly_ , surmounting the Grand Canyon sized rift between them. And a big part of that... because Duke didn't believe for a minute that it _hadn't_ affected Nathan, in some measure, for all that he was really good at pretending otherwise... A big part of that had to be the unifying force that it was better not to be a freak _alone_.

Nathan still had Duke's hand, though he'd relaxed from kissing it so hard and mangling his fingers. His breath travelled over the skin now as he held it close in front of his face, the puffs of air warm and soft.

So Nathan was real and Duke was real, Duke thought morbidly, his soul descending about to his boots. But the question that they had yet to answer, that they might not even find that answer to until weeks down the line from now, was whether _they_ , together, were still real.

Duke bit into the knuckles of his free hand. If this... if this had all been the weird, _weird_ pressures of the situation... if he was going to lose Nathan anyway... He wanted it back. The uncertainty, the unreality, the sense of revulsion and fear at inhabiting his own body... He'd trade it all back in an _instant_ for the guarantee he'd still be with Nathan. Trade it for Nathan, too, so maybe that wasn't very noble of him. But it was what it was.

He felt sick.

Though that could be partly the vending machine diet and his need for sleep.

"Come over here," Nathan said. His head rolled slightly crooked, observing Duke from an angle, and he exuded a certain perplexity. "What's wrong?"

"I lost your Barbie doll," Duke murmured. It was the first thing that came to mind when he looked for an option to deflect. "Last time I saw her we were in the ambulance. After that... the hospital and the O.R. and the near-death... I haven't a clue where she's gone."

"Duke!" Nathan groaned in dismay. "If she went back to the family..."

"I was _busy_." Duke pulled a face, seeking self-distraction. "What's a pint-sized woman to do in this world, anyway? I just can't even _imagine_... But, hey, she saved that kid. If she went back to the family, they might take her back. With heavy ground rules."

"We'll check later," Nathan mumbled drowsily. His eyelids were sagging. He seemed to be heading out again, but his fingers clutched around Duke's collar, and he drew Duke to him with a last effort, initiating a careful kiss from flat on his back.

 _Later_ was going to be a long while. Chances of finding anything after that length of time, if the doll _had_ cleared out completely, were nonexistent, Duke figured.

"Go home," Nathan slurred against his face. "You look like crap. Get some sleep, come back tomorrow. Doesn't seem I'm going anywhere."

His grip slipped away. His face sagged, eyes sliding shut, and even after all the nurses' reassurances, Duke embraced a moment of panic.

Nathan had said to go, but he didn't go, not right away.

He sat next to Nathan in the silent, white room and thought about being _alive_ , and what it might cost him.

END


End file.
